Good luck playing 1080p movies using hardware decoding in your shi-tty SPARC stuff, Iggy
Or emulating a SEGA CD system at a rock-solid 60FPS with shaders and zero input lag (running X-less, using native Dispmanx+EGL/GLES, and linuxraw as input method, thanks to a properly compiled RetroArch + core).
I prefer my Pis any day of the week over your noisy and power-hungry junk workstation. And my caps won't give the ghost anytime soon, either
It's not about raw CPU power. A self-called Amiga user should know it well.
I do believe I've been flamed!
Don't sweat it. I've got this.
If the Pi didn't have a really strong GPU and decoding section, that pathetic ARM 11 processor wouldn't be able to handle that either.
And I can do the video without any hardware assist on my G5 under MorphOS thank you.
As to Sparc, you apparently are not that all experienced with this ISA.
Its not designed for that kind of use.
Its designed for threading.
The two older processors that are now open source the UltraSparc T1 and T2 are eight core 64 bit processors that support four threads per core.
Work that out, its 32 concurrent threads.
These are several years old and AMD and Intel still can not match that.
And the T2+?
Supports multiple processors (as does the T3, T4, T5, each successively faster, you get where I'm going with this?).
As far as video decoding goes, I'm pretty sure a Sparc could handle that much better than any ARM processor (especially a single core ARM11) AND still handle 31 other concurrent tasks.
Now, the cheapest Sparc I have on hand cost me $8.99 and runs only about 100 MHz slower than your Pi.
And, its got a real expansion bus, and external video card, a DVD drive, you know real computer accessories.
I've thought about a T2 system, but really those aren't suited to single user functions (I'd never be able to really load it down). AND, the video card support on servers frankly sucks.
Also, my main system is X64 Opteron based.
If I really wanted a Linux monster, I'd buy a relatively cheap eight core AMD processor a lot of memory and some fast drives.
BTW - What is the maximum a Pi can access a drive at?
Can it do RAID?
I have a cheap SCSI Ultra320 RAID array in the Sun I'm typing on now.
Care to compare benchmarks on drive throughput with your Pi?
Why not? This system was about $20 before I added memory (and the drive array and controller I had lying around).
I can buy the extra electricity with the cash left over.
And I'm never going to misplace these bulky monsters.
Honestly, don't tax me comparing toys with business machines.
Its silly.
Jim