I am intrigued by the announced but not yet available or priced Supermico A1SQN (http://www.supermicro.com.tw/products/motherboard/quark/a1sqn.cfm). The motherboard has a 2.2W TDP Intel Quark processor, 512MB of ECC DRAM, dual fast Ethernet nic's, a <= 32GB Micro SDHC card slot and a pair of USB 2.0 ports. Phoronix tested Debian on Quark (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYyNTU) and it is not a powerful SoC. Still, I am confident Quark can handle a home firewall, router with NAT, DNS, DHCP. and OpenSSH servers (Shorewall, Dnsmasq and OpenSSH server). I am curious whether the remaining CPU cycles are adequate for a P2P daemon within the limits of a 32 GB SD card and a 1 Mb Internet connection. This is not a big deal: low end ARM router SoC's have handled this workload for years.
Quark is manufactured at a n-2 node (32nm) using transistors that are lots less efficient than the 14nm, but also maybe ~20% cheaper than 14nm due to the use of a fully depreciated fab. Even so, I suspect Quark may be the most energy efficient way to handle this almost trivial 24/7 workload. What efficient ARM motherboard that features/enables dual nic's should I also consider for this workload? Aside from entertainment value, my goals would be reasonable cost and maximum energy efficiency while being able to handle the workload. I have a soft spot in my heart for ECC DRAM in servers but ECC is not a must have feature.
Quark is manufactured at a n-2 node (32nm) using transistors that are lots less efficient than the 14nm, but also maybe ~20% cheaper than 14nm due to the use of a fully depreciated fab. Even so, I suspect Quark may be the most energy efficient way to handle this almost trivial 24/7 workload. What efficient ARM motherboard that features/enables dual nic's should I also consider for this workload? Aside from entertainment value, my goals would be reasonable cost and maximum energy efficiency while being able to handle the workload. I have a soft spot in my heart for ECC DRAM in servers but ECC is not a must have feature.