> >What about StrongARM?
I don't think StrongARM has really been considered. I might be wrong about
this; I never asked them about StrongARM.
> What David left unmentioned is that the company was founded by people
> who knew the MIPS. So intel and StrongARM probably weren't on the radar
> even if they could have been cheaper (I'm not saying they are, system
> costs are less dependent on the CPU than on many other factors, and
> integration factors play a huge role)
Two of the hardware engineers had experience with Apple's 68k and ppc
hardware; one of them did also work on the Indy but as far as I remember
nothing of the directly CPU related goo. Those two (and Sparc as well)
have been evaluated and found to be too expensive.
Intel has been on the radar but the CPU prices were way too high compared
to MIPS. As far as the costs go MIPS looses a bit again when considering
the costs of the chipsets as well. Things are different when talking about
highend silicon.
All in all I'd say the choice of MIPS vs. Intel for MIPS was right since for
a low margin high volume product like a microserver has to be to be
profitable the production costs count higher then the engineering costs.
Since most of the engineering extra costs for the MIPS product had only to
be invested for the first generation product, the OS, things look even
better for a second generation product.
Btw, the R5k variant in use is almost overkill when looking into some of the
competition's products. One of them es based on a 80186 ...
Ralf
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