[fedora-arm] 1ghz ARM Laptop (12in 1280x800 LCD)

[Gordan Bobic]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

>> Unfortunately, I'm not a hardware hacker. But, as a consumer, I'd say that a "1gb NAND Flash" is quite a bit below the level. I also wouldn't care much about a 1280x720 screen if the hardware wouldn't be capable of playing the video flawlessly. Or, if there was an HDMI port to connect to TV, which is, in my taste, better suited for watching.
> 
>  yep - all the designs i've worked on, and all the CPUs found (so far)
> were selected precisely because of the HDMI output capability.  i'd
> kinda ruled out the spea1310 because you need an extra IC converting
> LCD to DVI/HDMI or even *shudder* a PCI-e graphics IC (volari Z11 god
> help us is about the only free-software-compatible option)

I was just thinking about that, actually. If you're making a custom 
mobo, then as long as you can find an ARM SoC tht has PCI-e, you could 
just apply an MXM module and plug in an ATI or Nvidia GPU for which we 
already have passably working OSS drivers.

Of course, this defeats the purpose of the exercise - who in their right 
mind would use a 2W CPU with a 30W+ GPU in a laptop?

>  gordon is right about the SD/MMC card thing, but the "level 10" ones
> can at least guarantee above 10mbytes/sec *read* capability.   so
> _yes_ to the SATA interface.

The 10MB/s is _supposed_ to be for worst-case sequential writes. There 
is, however, no defined benchmark, and manufacturers are free to do 
their own testing. Most fail any sane real-world measurements of the 
specification.

Just about every SD card I have seen apart from high end Lexar and 
SanDisk manage a whopping 1-3 4KB write IOPS. Team Class 10 32GB SD card 
is among those. So the class rating is pretty much completely 
meaningless for anything except (at most) digital camera use where you 
are sequentially writing large files to a FAT32 file system.

I'm glad we agree on anything other than SATA being unworkable. :)

Gordan