On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 01:27:50AM -0400, Robin Humble wrote:
the next power conserving project is to get tv recording and viewing working from one or 2 or 3 arm boxes (record, nas, view? ~1-5W each) instead of all being done by one big x86 (~70W). alternatively I might rip apart a cheap hdmi x86 laptop for its low power motherboard (15-30W?), add bigger drives (boot off usb, internal 3tb & dvd, external 3tb usb?), and use that as an all-in-one. sadly low power x86 laptop chips in desktop motherboards doesn't seem to be common.
you might want to look into Intel Atom or AMD Fusion on mini-ITX or micro-ITX motherboards - they do use more power than an ARM but there are some very nicely featured motherboards and cases for them. generally a PCI and/or PCI-e slot, built-in NIC and wifi (often on a mini-PCI-e slot), standard DDR-3 RAM, SATA, USB, etc. both support hibernate and suspend to ram and/or disk too. IMO, the only reason to use a laptop for this kind of job is that the battery is effectively a nice UPS for it....but you'd lose that if you pulled it to pieces. laptop hardware tends to be weirder (as in non-standard) that ITX motherboards, some are seriously deranged....functional, but deranged. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #405: Sysadmins unavailable because they are in a meeting talking about why they are unavailable so much.