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.