[wickberg]

Yes, from a performance standpoint there's no reason to go after this type of system. No one is arguing this is a good system for production work.

The application of this is a teaching model. It's a lot easier to demonstrate parallelism gains on this type of platform. Scaling beyond a single ARM core is going to give you immediate performance benefits. Scaling further out to the entire cluster will continue to show returns.

With a single desktop, once you go beyond ~4 cores the gains will drop off too quickly. You just won't be able to see gains out to 64 threads on a single CPU, where on this you should.

It also doesn't hurt to have a quirky architecture to get students excited by. And yes, you could also spend some time discussing the architectural trade-offs and why this is not a cost-effective system for production use.

[aortega]

You are right. I'm still new in this site and don't know how to upvote comments so I wrote this.

[alter8]

I couldn't get this joke. What is this supposed to mean?

[aortega]

It was no joke. How I upvote something here?

[alter8]

Click the arrow that is to the left of the commenter's name. It seems you are one of today's lucky 10,000: http://xkcd.com/1053/

I made a bad assumption because your account is almost one year old. I'm sorry. Now I see that information is not given anywhere in this site. I think this vote method was taken from Reddit.