I’ve been wondering if i can cluster these boards for a small laptop sized beaglebone black computer. I wanted to see if it will be better than my laptop which was made in like 2006. And just want to use it for simple mathematics and astrophysics. And maybe some games like angry bird or 2d games. And maybe some doom??
It also help the company who makes these. Because I was thinking of buying over 20 of these just for the heck of it.
Clustering may work for the math / astrophysics applications you’re speaking of, but most likely not for the games. It really depends on how the applications you use were written.
We’d also need to know more about the laptop you currently have to judge performance differences.
I’d say that the BBB would play angry birds, and several other android games just fine. So long as 512MB of ram was enough. There is even a video on youtube somewhere of an LCD screen vendor who demo’d need for speed shift, angry birds, and a few other things. All of which seemed to work just fine. However, you would need to set all this up yourself.
So in short, the BBB would probably play games just fine as a single system, but clustering would not help. While clustering might help the math heavy apps you have in mind. Maybe.
I have a pentium dual core t4400 2.2 ghz. And since i think 4 BBB would match up to the equelivent of my cpu. My graphic cards is a intel hd family intergrated gpu. And it really sucks really bad. And I only have ddr 2 ram. And the BBB has ddr 3 ram. Also my intergrated gpu only has 32 mb of graphics ram. And I bet the bbb probably has a higher about of ram in the graphics card… And I only have 4 gb of ram. And 200 gb of storage. HHD
I have a similar laptop. T3400 as I recall with 4GB ram. Your answer is no, the BBB will not perform as good.
If you use a massively threaded application that crunches numbers you could cluster a few BBB together and probably see a benefit from it.
However, you’d be better off with somethign like an ODroid board, or perhaps even a wanderboard. These have more cores, and more memory( or can have ) Some of the oDroid boards are also known as iCore ( intel I3 ) killers performance wise.
I would have to second going with a different board I would choose the ODroid-XU or similar