On Oct 11, 2010, at 8:57 PM, Tony Yarusso <tonyyarusso at gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Josh Paetzel <josh at tcbug.org> wrote: >> mini-ITX form factor atoms are really moving in on this space. For $100 >> cheaper than I could get a soekris 5501 I got a dual core 1.6 ghz atom, with >> dual gigE ethernet. You can get very small mini-ITX cases that just use a 12 >> volt power brick. My system pulls 20 watts a idle, almost entirely due to the >> 2.5" laptop hard drive it has. > > It's true. The early Atoms had a less-than-impressive heat/power > profile, but they've improved that significantly in recent revisions, > so now I'm considering picking up one of these for a router system, > which is a fanless board with dual gigE: > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182233 > > - Tony > > And that's a fairly expensive atom board. :) Mine is slightly older (330). It shows up to the OS as 4 cpus, dual core 1.6 ghz with hyperthreading. It's just powerful enough to tempt me to do compiles on it. Make buildworld of FreeBSD 8 is a mere 5 hours. (It's 11 minutes on my dual 2.26ghz Nehalem) In some ways it's just fast enough for me to treat it as a regular system as opposed to an embedded device. (Which is what I use it as) In the end though what really sold me was the gigE ethernet ports. While my WAN connection can't saturate 100TX *today* it won't be long before it can. My current cable modem has a gigE port, and I see comcast is advertising a 105mbps connection now. Thanks, Josh Paetzel