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aguki

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Windows 10 Review 11 years ago

I'm running Windows 7 as a Xen guest using Intel GVT-g on my i3-5005U (2C4T, HD Graphics 5500) for the past week now. I've pinned 2 vcpus each to both Dom0 (Ubuntu 15.04) and DomU and use both simultaneously in a dual monitor setup.

I can't comment about Photoshop or Illustrator as I have no experience using those programs, though I do a fair bit of work with PCB CAD tools: OrCAD, EAGLE. I haven't ran into any major issues thus far. Media playback works fine btw; mpv does not report any skipped frames when playing 1080p webm files downloaded from Youtube with youtube-dl.

AMD lets you pass your graphics cards through to your VMs, no problem.

This is still based on a 1-1 basis i.e. one GPU passthrough-ed for one VM. Intel's GVT-g, notably XenGT, is IMO more interesting: allowing for one iGPU to be shared with up to 4 VMs (DomU + 3 DomU). This is especially interesting considering Intel's recent inroads into the GPU market with Iris Pro graphics, even bundling them with certain Xeon CPUs.

The OpenSSD project[1] might be worth a look. If you don't fancy paying thousands of dollars, you can buy SSD controller boards and raw NAND flash chips off Taobao and assemble them together. There's plenty of information on various Chinese forums (Mydigit, Upan etc.), admittedly more towards USB flash drives. Some older flash chips are TSOP rather than BGA which makes hand soldering much easier.

[1] http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project

At that price point (~$500), one can get a i7-4XXXT in a fanless barebones setup off Aliexpress, though which CPU you get is entirely dependent on available stock.

http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Fanless-Mini-Compact...

The case seems to be an Akasa model, or an OEM variant, which rates passive cooling CPUs up to 35W TDP, so 45W cpus offered seems to be pushing it.

I'll probably get one of these, or a Broadwell version when released, once my Novena arrives, to run any x86/Windows only software.

I wanted a display like this for years. In fact, I even did a lot of research to build my own. The biggest hurdle was getting a manufacturer to sell me a big-enough panel at reasonable cost. Absolutely nobody wanted to do anything less than 1k units (understandable, I guess), and I wanted only a few units.

This guy claiming access to 13.3" panels, and he quoted me $2800 for a single 13.3" dev kit along SDK when I PMed him several months back.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hwstartups/comments/2e5o61/i_have_e...

Novena Update 12 years ago

I also get the feeling that desktop browsers (chromium, firefox) aren't very well optimised for ARM.

Freescale provides hardware video decoding support for Chromium's GPU media stack[1].

chrome://gpu snippet on my Sabre Lite running Chromium 37.0.2062.120:

Graphics Feature Status

* Canvas: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled

* Flash: Hardware accelerated

* Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated

* Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated

* Compositing: Hardware accelerated and threaded

* Rasterization: Hardware accelerated

* Threaded Rasterization: Enabled

* Video Decode: Hardware accelerated

* Video Encode: Hardware accelerated

* WebGL: Hardware accelerated

[1]https://github.com/Freescale/chromium-imx