ECX 2000 vs Atom 2000

It’s not to often that it’s really worth looking at the bottom end of any category of goods. This includes microservers. They typically aren’t up to the task, and likely to cause more headaches then their worth.

This apparently was the case with the last Atom and ECX microserver chips put out. They were underwhelming at best, and the low end Xeon processors would really do a better job. That is slowly being turn around and the new ECX 2000 and Atom 2000 processors prove that although they aren’t extremely fast, they are worth the price.

Both of the processors offer an extremely low power draw (about 8-9W TDP), and prove to be decent performers when it comes to running light webservers.  This could be great for small companies such as uDream, or people looking to offer up decent webservers for themselves or a small office.

Anandtech ran the numbers, pop over and take a look!

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry PI computer is an interesting piece of technology. I first heard about it in February at a Meetup group. The guy had said he owned a few and thought they were great for project computers. I didn’t think much of it but it always sat in the back of my mind.

Fast forward a couple of months and I was sitting in a book store and thought I might see what they had for books in the tech section. I ran into a book on the Rasberry Pi and sat down to read it…. The Raspberry Pi project turned out to be created to teach people how to program. It’s an inexpensive computer that runs Linux. Of course the beauty of Linux is it allows you a lot of power if you know how to program for it.

It’s not a powerful computer, it runs an ARM processor with low end integrated graphics. But it seems to run Linux relatively well from what I can see. Because it is about the size of an Altoids tin, you are also limited to SD cards and external hard drives for storage. But given they are $35 computers, it is hard to complain.

I think they are awesome little computers, and if you want to get more information you should take a look at the site :

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Leave your comments and  discussion, I would love to hear thoughts!