Now this is a 4-core built by ARM that can use as little 1.5 per processor 1.1-1.4 GHZ http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycore/ecx1000

and can be combined to make this

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/hp-and-cal...ll-bring-all-the-boys-to/

This I could see being used for our needs and at 5 watts per 4 cores

EDIT: my math is probably wrong somewhere, I love'd this idea so much it made me put a lil in their stock.

Well said Sgt.Joe

I followed the R-Pi project development closely for many reasons, WCG being one of them, but if it won't crunch WCG , it won't crunch.

There are plenty of very low power crunch-boxes around, Mini-Itx motherboards offer lots of possibilities, as does crunching on Intel Atoms; the MkI Asus EeePc's are around for peanuts. I ran one for WCG over a couple of months, 24/7, and while progress was snail-like, it did crunch.

There are a lot of other equations you can play with for low-cost crunching, do four R-Pi's do as much work for the same cost as a used Atom-box for instance?

If power consumption isn't a worry, 2.8 Ghz Prescott Dell boxes are on Amazon UK for £49.00, about twice the price of a Pi, and they will do a lot more than twice the work of a Pi, whle keeping the house nicely warmed.

There will also be a lot more iPhones in the world than R-Pi's (there's a discussion around about those, I think).

Of course, this may not be the point. :-)

I'd like to see a Pi/GPU ARM crunch box, but not at any great cost to the WCG devlopment team, unless it got more overall numbers crunchified. Maybe in five years?

Hi Uplinger

I got this update in my email yesterday

"Having successfully passed its CE compliance testing, we can now confirm that your Raspberry Pi will be delivered by the end of June."

Sounds like a long wait but it's nowhere near as bad as waiting for AMD/Intel/Nvidia/Microsoft to drop their latest promised whatever

Best thing about the World Community Grid.... it teaches patience

June will surely follow May

Dave

As we are talking about efficiency then we should give a look at the work that can be done per watt and compare. I perfectly agree that everybody contributes what he can. If he can afford the cost of 5 or ten watts 24/7 then this contribution has the same value as those that do 10 kW or more 24/7.
That said I am not so sure that in terms of work carried out per watt the ARM solution would be more efficient, simply because the design is for another purpose.
We have two cases to look for:

1) The individual. For him the ARM solution whatever the efficiency in terms of crunched work does not matter. What matters is the lowest possible cost of acqusition of the CPU and related system and the absolute consumption value because this is what he will be billed for.

2) The whole grid. Here it is important that code is designed to run on cpu's that are effcient in terms of work per watt. Why? simply because multiplying the inefficiency by the hundred thousands or million cores, creates terrible waste of energy, horrible carbon footprint etc. It is up to WCG to design in a way to find the right compromise.

Now my few cents here. If I am coherent and WCG does share this point of view then going GPU is the real step forward in terms of energy efficiency.