Is there a chance a Boinc program could be written for the Tegra 2 (ARM9/ARM11/NVidia computer on a board)?

Although it's not x86 compliant, apparently Chrome (a Linux based OS) is set to use Tegra 2. You can see it used with Android 2.1 here. These will soon be in mobiles, ee pads, TVs, consoles, net-top computers and other devices (Prototype). Over the next 18moths it is expected that over 1 Billon will be sold. We know these are very energy efficient but they are not slow either; can outperform an Atom CPU. I guess the dual 1GHz Cortex A9 cores are it's most promising feature, but it is also OpenGL compatible, so perhaps a simplified Boinc app could be specifically written for this Tegra 2 architecture.

What do you think?

Porting BOINC isn't the problem, there is one for mobile phones and such already: BOINCOID. No, the problem is project applications. Not all can run on these non-PC systems, due to minimum CPU strength, RAM usage, energy usage, heat and such minute things. Plus most projects are proprietary, meaning that they write and keep up their own software, it isn't open source and thus can't easily be ported to whatever next (obscure) platform man thinks of.

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Thanks for your reply Jord,
You have identified several generic problems, some of which apply and some of which may not, in this case.
Glad to hear porting is not a problem for Boinc.
I know it would not be to every projects taste, but I would have thought some projects might be interested.
A dual 1GHz CPU core that performs about twice as fast as the Atom (per core) may be on the low side, but there are plenty of Boinc projects that don’t need an i7 on OC.
WRT heat, it uses 40nm chip technology. They will not generate high temperatures, given the small transistor count.
The energy requirements are exceptionally low (compared to an Atom); even a small hand held device, with a tiny battery could play 1080p video for 16hours.
Although some projects do require large amounts of RAM (the Lattice Project), most require less than 100MB, and many require about 10MB – next to nothing really. Tegra 2 can support several GB of DDR2. With 4GB Micro-SD being available for about $10, I don’t think adding RAM would be much of a problem either. It also supports USB2.

I think the main problem is getting a project to take it on, but even if 0.001% of Tegra 2 users contributed to that project, there would still be about 10,000 contributors by the end of a year, and many of these people would probably contribute elsewhere and in the future (a year or two when Tegra 3 comes out, or a competitor). While many of these will turn up in mobile devices, hundreds of millions will also turn up in devices with permanent locations, such as TV's.

It’s hardly fair to say an architecture with a history of over 10Billion devices is Obscure!

It’s hardly fair to say an architecture with a history of over 10Billion devices is Obscure!

LOL

That's why I put it in parenthesis. :-)
The main problem remains, that even though these gadgets can play video for so many hours, running any project at full force will eat up battery. I've been looking for the post from the person who did Boincoid, can't find it that quickly, but he said somewhere he wants to restart the project and make it so that when Boinc runs it will only do so when the platform is powered by wall-power, not by battery.

I'll hunt on for his post..

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I'll hunt on for his post..

Found it. See Oded's posts in this thread at the Seti forums.

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The main problem remains, that even though these gadgets can play video for so many hours, running any project at full force will eat up battery...

Well, perhaps not. These are Extremely energy efficient and if the CPU is used it should be able to crunch for longer than if an HD movie is played on the GPU. Also, they are comming to a TV near you, and sometime soon. In fact Audi have them in a range of their cars (I dont think power will be an issue there).

Over to Oded...

I believe that it's a good opportunity for tablet devices. The FLOPS/W if it's high enough, maybe will see some optimizations. Otherwise, you can run nci tasks, like freeHAL, even on mobile devices.

Microsoft's Windows chief Steven Sinofsky demonstrates Windows running on an Atom and 3 different Arm processors, including Tegra. Apparently, he also suggested that application and device compatibility won't be a major barrier.

Read more: Microsoft shows Windows running on ARM | News | PC Pro
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/364066/microsoft-shows-windows-running-on-arm

While some have dismissed these processors as being too weak or requiring too much energy, the opposite is in fact the truth. These are quite powerful CPU’s but not power hungry CPU’s. The Microsoft’s Tablet/Slate operating system requires the same hardware spec as Win7. If it’s powerful enough to run Win7 then it’s powerful enough to crunch on.

"When you think of mobile devices and slates and what we think of as PCs, they've all converged" - Sinofsky.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/2013854643_ces_2011_microsoft_shows_future_windows_running_on.html

Obviously it is not x86 but perhaps by the end of 2012 we will be able to run Boinc on a tablet.