It’s unofficially doable; a few folks won the $14,000 odd prize for it. Practically nothing on the machine works, though. I am reminded of the situation of Solaris on X86 – noone wants it because the hardware support is so poor. The reason for the poor hardware support is that there isn’t anywhere the number of driver developers as there would be for such beasts as Linux or Windows.
640×480 (or 800×600 I think) VGA graphics drive, no wifi, no networking, no bluetooth. Pretty much useless from the usable laptop front. I’d take Linux on it before Windows if that’s the case. Of course theres a fully functional unix machine under the hood for Mac OS X, and while someone will probably want to shoot me for it, the fact that it’s proprietary isn’t too much of a big loss.
I was talking to my mate Mark on St. Paddys day about Hyper Threading processors, and he was mentioning that they’re not the best at high-performance computation (without extensive and expensive hints in the code). I agreed, mentioning that the latest generation of multi-core processors offer roughly equivalent cost and scale almost multi-processorly. I then went on to explain that the multi-threaded processors are better for I/O workloads, you shove a lot of the scheduling cost back into the silicon where it belongs, rather than having the OS deal with it in software.
For a big server, performing lots of I/O, a multi-core and multi-threaded processor would be the best of both worlds, and based on the direction that Sun is taking with the Niagra system, one can see that this can be taken to a scary extreme – consider 8 core with 8 threads per core all on the one processor module. The power-savings alone would be enough to warrant buying these machines.
Im still waiting for quotes on a few more laptops. I can wait, I just don’t know for how much longer. Meanwhile I’ll probably buy a phone. Nokia 6230i looks like a cheap and easy option – buyable from €260.19. Or maybe an annoying smartphone like the iMate PDA 2K (it’s the original of the O2 XDA IIs).
If it wasn't for carbon-14, I wouldn't date at all