> > BTW, why a MIPS instead of say an Alpha or a Sparc chip ? Is this linux,
> > Sw/HW engineering related or politics/marketing/price consequences ?
> > I agree this is certainly a bit out of scope of linux-kernel ...
>
> Probably was picked based on price/performance... my guess would be
> with emphasis on price. Alphas and SPARCs are both very expensive.
Yes, that was the reason. The middle and lower class MIPS chips offer a
very good price / performance ratio. The high end MIPS stuff is expensive
similar expensive like other RISCs and also requires very expensive chipsets,
cooling etc. while the CPU used in the Cobalt product gets about 30 degrees
Celsius when loaded and stays at almost ambient temperature when idle.
Means there is not even a heat sink on the CPU and therefore the the Cobalt
system very silent - and reliable.
The Qube is designed as a black box about which one does not need to know
about the architecture. It's therefore quite independant of the actual
CPU architecture used. The choice of the CPU was therefore only driven
by the need to design the best product, not by politics and marketing.
Ralf
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