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Date:      Wed, 15 Jul 1998 21:32:37 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        sthaug@nethelp.no
Cc:        tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Wrong comment in pmap_bootstrap() about virtual_avail?
Message-ID:  <199807152132.OAA20814@usr08.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <3972.900489931@verdi.nethelp.no> from "sthaug@nethelp.no" at Jul 15, 98 10:05:31 am

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> > Maybe he's proting FreeBSD to the relatively high powered, yet
> > very inexpensive MIPS chip based systems that are out there.
> ...
> > Still, are you aware that the "Cobalt" thin server platform, running
> > MIPS Linux, has hardware about 1/3 as expensive as comparable Intel
> > hardware?
> 
> Just how inexpensive are we talking here? Where can we buy the stuff?

You can by MIPS chips and smaple PC boards from MIPS, Inc..

As far as price, Nintendo machines run MIPS chips, and are under
$200.


Cobalt is a just a company using their own MIPS-based proprietary
hardware and a Linux OS to sell, effectively, Linux PC's in blue
cubic boxes.

If you are interested in blue cubic boxes, they don't sell them
seperately; you would be better of finding an old "Cubix" box
with an 386 or 486, painting it blue, and running FreeBSD on it.

8-).

Or you could always ort to the '030/'040 and paint an old "NeXT
cube" blue...

8-) 8-).


For an embedded system, non-Intel hardware is almost invariably
cheaper.  You could get "Cobalt" class SPARC hardware directly
from Sun for resale for under $1000 for quantity, for example,
and that's ssuming expensive Sun cases and paying for their board
design instead of your own, and giving them margin on everything
including the hard disk, instead of just on the processor and
necessary support chips.

You could probably do a JAVA-chip based system even cheaper (JAVA
rings go for $50), but of course it would suck because it wouldn't
be capable of running BSD.

8^p.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.

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