Folks,

Me and Nick have been back and forth with the IFC6410,  using Linaro's
utopic Ubuntu + 3.17 kernel, and I can now declare it stable enough to
run toolchain tests, maybe not yet builds.

The reason is that the kernel, although stable, is only just because
it throttles speed to a minimum. So, the core runs at 920MHz and the
memory bus is at its minimum frequency. Nick gathers we could speed it
up by a factor of 30% and 40% respectively while remaining on the
safety zone.

However, that would still be not enough. Currently, the boards build
LLVM in 7hs, when a Panda does it in 5h, a Chromebook does in 3.5hs
and a Chrome2 in 2hs. Improving it by 85% would get us just under 4hs,
which is still worse than a Chromebook. If we increase the CPU clock
to 1.5GHz per core, we may get it fast enough (but still slower than
the Chrome2), to be useful.

Their form-factor are better for rack-usage (remote serial, remote
reboot, small footprint), so even being slower than Chrome 2s, they'll
be faster than Chrome 1s and much more rack-friendly. That, of course,
assuming they remain stable at 1.5GHz. Heating will be an issue, but
we now have a decent server room and we can buy rack-mounted fans for
them, if we need it.

In a nutshell, I won't give up on them just yet, but I won't speed up
replacing the other boards with them either. We may have to wait a few
more releases to be sure, but I'm not expecting anything going in
production before February.

cheers,
--renato

PS: Nick, if you want to increase the clock speeds now just to see
what happens, I'm game.

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