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There will be a limited multitouch (dualtouch gestures) support in Neo900 thanks to CRTOUCH chip: https://www.freescale.com/weba...

And who do you think writes code for these things? Faries?

We could try to raise funds to pay for reverse engineering of the VPU in the Novena laptop -- if we could find skilled reverse engineers ready to take the job. Can you introduce me to any?

A quick search turns up this product description which points to the Freescale i.MX6Q specs.

Does anyone know what he means with "VPU"?

The GPU is a Vivante GC2000, which has been partially reverse engineered already; support is being added to etnaviv, which is a user-space driver -- the part connecting Mesa + Gallium to the kernel driver -- for the Vivante graphics cores (support older cores like the GC860 is good enough for everyday use). The kernel driver itself (galcore) is available under GPL, although it could use a cleanup. So there is no need to reverse engineer everything from scratch, but the etnaviv project could certainly use more contributors.

There is also a video decoding acceleration block in the i.MX6, but like all things H.264 that is likely a patent minefield, so I'm not sure it would be worth spending a lot of resources on reverse engineering that.

According to Freescale's statement, eight of the individuals were Chinese employees and twelve were Malaysian. My guess is that they were probably management and Process Engineers traveling to a factory in China to oversee production of a new product.

It uses these. They are MOSFETs, so probably not GaN, but maybe SiGe?

This. The latest crop of MEMS pressure sensors actually have enough resolution to estimate your altitude to within a foot or so, and are sold for exactly this purpose. Combine this pressure reading with local weather (available from your data connection) to cancel out day-to-day barometric fluctuations, and the phone can hit you up with ads targeted to not only what shop you're in, but which floor you're on (GPS has horrible vertical accuracy).

Your options are... limited.

The people who make 'ARM-based server motherboards' generally bundle them with cases and sell them as network attached storage devices. (Anything mentioned on the Debian on Orion or Debian on Kirkwood pages will be discussing ARM 'servers' based on those Marvel SoCs, some of which have a reasonable number of drive bays).

Some ARM dev boards will also break out an SATA port; but generally only one, (something like Freescale's i.MX53 dev board) as they usually focus on being dev boards, with the SATA port just there because dev boards usually populate all the pins the device can handle, not because you are supposed to use them for server work.

In the cheap seats, a small minority of the hackable tablet/set-top-box focused devices have SATA support. The Allwinner A10, which is cheap as dirt and all over the place, provides it; but substantially fewer devices break it out. The mele A1000 and A2000 are some of the few.

In practice, what you really are asking for doesn't exist(to my knowledge). Your best bet, today, is probably to find a NAS that suits you and has decent 3rd-party firmware support, and call it a day. Virtually nothing else has multiple drive support, and(while NAS devices can have a bit of sticker shock, dev boards aren't known for mass-market pricing, or for niceties like 'microATX form factor', so you'd end up having to hack on the case anyway).

There just isn't an ARM equivalent to, say, any of the cheap microATX Intel Atom or AMD APU based boards($60-$100 once you add some RAM) which draw a bit more power; but are almost insultingly capable in terms of peripherals and raw punch by comparison.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=TWR-LCD&tid=m32TWR

Lots of different stuff you can do with it. Hope that helps.

You might want to look at the TWR-LCD board.
It's a Smart LCD screen that you communicate over SPI or EBI. You can pare it with a number of Micro-controllers in the Tower system, add some proto boards for special stuff, and then use the free eGUI software to create the demo. Or read the app note

Full disclosure: I work for Freescale

You might want to look at the TWR-LCD board.
It's a Smart LCD screen that you communicate over SPI or EBI. You can pare it with a number of Micro-controllers in the Tower system, add some proto boards for special stuff, and then use the free eGUI software to create the demo. Or read the app note

Full disclosure: I work for Freescale

You might want to look at the TWR-LCD board.
It's a Smart LCD screen that you communicate over SPI or EBI. You can pare it with a number of Micro-controllers in the Tower system, add some proto boards for special stuff, and then use the free eGUI software to create the demo. Or read the app note

Full disclosure: I work for Freescale

You might want to look at the TWR-LCD board.
It's a Smart LCD screen that you communicate over SPI or EBI. You can pare it with a number of Micro-controllers in the Tower system, add some proto boards for special stuff, and then use the free eGUI software to create the demo. Or read the app note

Full disclosure: I work for Freescale

That unit you listed frankly isn't a good buy anyway. it has a single core CPU, uses 12w, and is $200 for a 10 inch. You can find Atom dual core netbooks in 10 inch for damned close to that price and they use less power for twice the cores. The AMD versions are 12 inches and they feel more like an ultraportable and both the Intel and AMD can run all the X86 apps while this of course can't.

Not saying ARM can't compete in that market, just saying so far nobody has been putting out competitive units at the right price point. what they need is a dual core unit, either 10 or 12 inches (12 would probably be cheaper as those screens are being made more than the 10 inch now) and a price point of $150 or less. This is the same problem that those have tried to compete with Apple have run into, in that unless you have something really innovative like the transformer if you get your price too close to Apple's most will choose the Apple and the same holds true of X86 and ARM. After all if there is only $20-$50 difference why would I want to limit myself to a cell phone OS and programs when i can have X86 and run anything I want including those same cell phone programs (sold through Intel Appstore) as well as x86 programs?

Time to call out an ARM manufacturer.

We recently got a Freescale i.mx53 Quickstart Board. Nice piece of kit they just released. Seems good for many of the applications we're thinking of.

Problem: It ships with 2.6.35, more than a year old. With 505 patches. And proprietary graphics.

We really want the 3.0 kernel, because it's supported by the -rt patches.

Freescale, Freescale, Freescale! PLEASE make more of an effort to mainline your changes! And use a graphics core that has drivers that can be recompiled, even if it's the NVIDIA model.

You may be interested by the latest demo board from Freescale, which is less powerful than the Samsung, but very comparable to the BeagleBoard: i.MX53 Quick Start Board.

At $150, it is a good bargain, and it's a Linaro target as well.

you're wrong there - they may be closed-box systems for the end user, but they are supplied to the 3rd party with the OS and toolchain ready to be customised.

These base manufacturers provide the base platform which is taken by these companies (eg Western Digital, Raidsonic, Asus, Syabas etc) who add their own interfaces and customisations to differentiate themselves in the market. Once you look under the hood of these things, you find they all have the same video processor and chipset. (well, there's about 2 or 3 different base manufacturers for these devices).

That's just those for an example, all the others are the same - base platform SoC purchased in bulk and customised by a company who then sells them to consumers. The same applies to a lot of other stuff that are built into closed boxes - they're still built into that by a 'higher level' manufacturer.

Linux has had a lot of GUI tools for a very long time, you're showing your ignorance if you don't even know about Athena widgets! (used for Unix GUIs since 1988 or so) but then don't forget a lot of GUI devices in this area might not even have a traditional screen so a VB GUI isn't really going to be of any use.

See, in the world of embedded devices, usually those put together as cheaply as possible (ie everything nowadays :( ) then Linux is the de-facto standard. After all, who'd want to build a brand new door lock control system themselves when they can just buy a Freescale microcontroller and modify its software using the supplied tools (in this case Codewarrior IDE)

I think you need to find out a lot more of this area, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what is out there. The world only runs Windows in a relatively small marketplace.

you're wrong there - they may be closed-box systems for the end user, but they are supplied to the 3rd party with the OS and toolchain ready to be customised.

These base manufacturers provide the base platform which is taken by these companies (eg Western Digital, Raidsonic, Asus, Syabas etc) who add their own interfaces and customisations to differentiate themselves in the market. Once you look under the hood of these things, you find they all have the same video processor and chipset. (well, there's about 2 or 3 different base manufacturers for these devices).

That's just those for an example, all the others are the same - base platform SoC purchased in bulk and customised by a company who then sells them to consumers. The same applies to a lot of other stuff that are built into closed boxes - they're still built into that by a 'higher level' manufacturer.

Linux has had a lot of GUI tools for a very long time, you're showing your ignorance if you don't even know about Athena widgets! (used for Unix GUIs since 1988 or so) but then don't forget a lot of GUI devices in this area might not even have a traditional screen so a VB GUI isn't really going to be of any use.

See, in the world of embedded devices, usually those put together as cheaply as possible (ie everything nowadays :( ) then Linux is the de-facto standard. After all, who'd want to build a brand new door lock control system themselves when they can just buy a Freescale microcontroller and modify its software using the supplied tools (in this case Codewarrior IDE)

I think you need to find out a lot more of this area, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what is out there. The world only runs Windows in a relatively small marketplace.

Who owns the ARM license right now? Motorola Mobility or Motorola solutions

Freescale.

Devices like that are available in the automotive field, as well. Freescale makes this one: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC564xL It has ECC on RAMs and Flash, Logic BIST and Memory BIST at reset and two CPUs running in lockstep which are constantly monitored by hardware.

Actually for automotive use there are embedded devices available which protect against single-bit errors, like the MPC5643L. It has two CPUs which are running in lockstep and are constantly checked against each other, other measures like ECC protect the memories etc. It's protected against problems like aging as well: it can test it's own logic and memories as part of the startup sequence (built-in self test). Not quite the same standard as in the aviation field, but still an interesting device.

Yes, but how sure are you that if you leave it in a filing cabinet for 10 years it'll still work when you come back to it?

Very sure, because I'll make 20 copies for a few dollars, and store several at off-site locations, to guarantee one survives, no matter what.

Data printed on paper can last for hundreds of years with relative ease.

No it can't. WORDS written on paper can last for a very long time, because it's very low density, and very predictable, so it can be recovered even after substantial degradation. Once you start going for higher densities, you're worse off using paper than you would be encoding it on a digital medium like a CD/DVD.

Even if paper has a longer shelf-life, it has NO durability against handling, or any other form of abuse. Additionally, the benefit of digital has always been the trivial ease of transferring multiple copies to different devices, and to newer media (once every 20 years)...

And finally, yes, Flash is quite durable:

Typical Data Retention for Freescale Semiconductor NVM Technologies

Using the above definition, the following NVM technologies from Freescale Semiconductor are capable of achieving greater than 100 years of intrinsic data retention.

http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/eng_bulletin/EB618.pdf

Sure the chip is designed for e-books, but it has some great features for general-purpose, low-power computing:
Flash support
1400x1050 display support
5xUART
256k L2 cache

This is awesome value at $10.

Apple already beat all estimations on what it'd cost. I think everyone on /. was estimating around $999 (as was everyone else on the net). All of the closest competitors are around that price point.

Why not just ask for it for free?

A camera would be nice.

Freescale has a similar device that they're targeting for the $199 price point. The Smartbook comes with a camera and USB ports, and is a 7" touchscreen tablet.

Motorola's chip division is now called Freescale semiconductor and their portfolio of 32bit processors is quite rich http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?nodeId=0162468rH3. Granted, most of them are not suitable for a PC, but some are - and yes, they do run Linux ;).

This exact thing was done by Josh Smith at MIT in the 90s (see Geocities era page here ). His work was commercialized by Motorolla in their e-field sensing chip.

You mean something like the Freescale iMX.515?

Motorola spun out its semiconductors division a few years ago - now you can find it at http://www.freescale.com/

Yes they are still producing CPUs, in fact they even still make the 68040. Chances are one of their processors powers your cell phone. Or your music player, etc.

Motorola spun out its semiconductors division a few years ago - now you can find it at http://www.freescale.com/

Yes they are still producing CPUs, in fact they even still make the 68040. Chances are one of their processors powers your cell phone. Or your music player, etc.

For that to happen, MS would have to follow standards. You know where this discussion will go.

The offending code wasn't written by Microsoft. It was in a driver written by Freescale, which provides the hardware MS uses in Zune.

The fault of MS in this case is that they didn't do proper QA, not that they wrote this (clearly moronic) code.

By the way, what does it have to do with "following standards"? We're talking about algorithms here, not representations. If someone writes a bubble sort in production code, it's stupid beyond measure, but it's not "non-standard" (because there's no standard).

Motorola have been pissed off and loosing money since CHRP didn't happen. http://www.convergence.org/platforms/chrp/main.html The company is dieing. All they have left is poor handsets with a dreadful GUI... Should have stayed in semi-conductors http://www.freescale.com/

``And Motorola is probably still at 500MHz.''

Actually, they gave up on the desktop CPU market. They spun off their chip division into Freescale Semiconductor, which now makes embedded processors.

Since the Freescale MPC5121e mobileGT processor has the PCI bus, SATA controller, PATA controller, timers, real-time clock, DMA controller, memory card controllers, Flash memory interfaces, Ethernet, 2D and 3D graphics, and USB integrated I'd like to ask which other components you're talking about.

It's a true embedded processor, and is actually listed as an automotive systems processor on Freescale's site. It has two IPUs, BTW, so I wish people would stop comparing it to single-core CISC chips like the Geode.

According to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR CherryPal uses a Freescale MPC5121e CPU, and this page http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/brochure/FLYMPC5121ECON.pdf (PDF: 154kb) says that it alone uses up to 2 Watts.

I'm currently using Magneto-RAM in a project. I'm also interested in the development of Carbon Nanotube-based NRAM from Nantero. Density is more important than speed for most NV storage applications. Unless the cost structure and density changes substantially vs Flash ROM, these types of exotic NV RAMs are going to be useful only in situations that require a lot of write accesses: like storing the directory info for a cheaper/larger Flash-ROM array which can't support as many write cycles. Even in these situations the exotic NV RAMs are just a replacement for SRAM and a Battery which is cheaper because the structure, processes and materials are standard.

Zilog is still alive. Motorola has been renamed to Freescale and spun-off.

Well, NEC Electronics does, and they're even 90nm! (650nm and 350nm versions also available.) Also Freescale, and Texas Instruments, and Maxim (no, not the magazine) and ... lots of people, especially those who want to have decently-performing analog circuits.

You kids these days thinking everything is CMOS. Go ahead and try to make me a 10GHz RF circuit in CMOS.

The problem with the PXA versions of the ARM based SOC's has been proprietary and/or binary only libraries. Linux runs on the core cpu but you run into a wall when you need to get multimedia codecs or 2d/3d graphics support working at any usable rate.

RMI Mips based (formerly AMD/Alechemy) SOC's http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/products_alchemy/ are more open when it comes to multimedia and Linux support.

3DLabs has some multicore ARM mutimedia 2D/3D SOC's http://www.3dlabs.com/content/mediaProcessor.asp . But they don't open the tools and libraries to develop codecs.

Freescale also has their i.MX line of ARM media SOC's http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/taxonomy.jsp?nodeId=0162468rH311432973ZrDR

Debian/Linux and UBoot support is available for the cores for many ARM SOC's but the problem has always been open source with the multimedia and graphics acceleration portions of the designs.

I wrote diagnostic software for SNAP-ON a while back. I was completely amazed on how high-tech the trucks are these days. It seemed every physical switch had some sort of digital representation through the CAN bus.

Fuel flow rate, engine temp, etc,...

Learn More (YMMV): (PDF Warning for bottom one)
http://www.specifications.nl/can/protocol/can_UK_protocol.php
http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/data_sheet/BCANPSV2.pdf

Replying to my own post - here's a brief paper explaining the technology (PDF warning):
http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/brochure/BRMRAMTECHGUIDE.pdf

Have you looked in the BSPs provided by Freescale for SEC block support? See http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=0127260061033202A5 I know the patches exist to add Linux support, they just aren't part of the mainline kernel tree. Freescale is pretty good about Linux drivers for devices, a lot of embedded projects use Linux and Freescale sells a lot of chips to those projects.

You should probably install an electronic flow control valve with a flow sensor. Use a microcontroller, PLC, or some such thing to monitor your sensor & control your valve. Monitoring it visually (via camera hooked to an embedded computer) is doable, but way harder than what I just described above. You also run into problems with high temperatures getting to your camera. Take a look at some of the solutions Freescale has to offer. You can order a development board, so you can breadboard something together. Should cost around $200. http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage. jsp?nodeId=02430Z For a SR Design project for Electrical & Computer engineering, we were tasked to do exactly this with a freescale microcontroller. We needed to precisely monitor the amount of certain gasses put into an oven we use to bake chips. Hardest part about all of this is getting to know the specific PLC or microcontroller you're using. PLC's are easier (generally) to program than most microcontrollers, but not quite as versatile in number/type of interfaces. You need to have a very good understanding of Assembly, C, & how sensors work. You also need to be able to read & understand the mind numbing manuals & technical documents describing the sensors & microcontrollers you choose to use. -Steve

Sure, you can open source hardware, but only in a BSD-style way. Chumby is trying to share-alike their hardware design, but that doesn't work as well as GPL for software or CC Share Alike for something like a work of fiction because while a schematic or PCB can be copyrighted, the netlist implied therin cannot be protected. With dense ASICs/SoCs where most of the design complexity is on-die rather than in the connections on the PCB and the registers in the chip are freely documeted, reverse-engineering isn't hard.

Chumby's response to this is (parphrasing) "fine hook stuff up to the chumbilical by looking at the MX.21 reference design and tracing connections and you won't be subject to our hardware license," but I wonder if they'll really be hands-off if an accessory developed without agreeing to their hardware developers' license is commercially successful. They're selling the hardware at slim margins and hoping to make profit on the service.

Nice processor. (MPC8343E) I should see if one of my associates can handle a Bit Torrent client. (Less powerful Cirrus EP9302, but stand-alone. And yes, IRL.)

They are listing several different pretty large chips along with a ARM9 core from Samsung which exists as IP only. Do you really think Apple would put together their own silicon if ready made solutions exist?

When looking at the iPhone feature list (GSM, EDGE, Quad band, WiFi, Bluetooth, Video and Audio playback, camera support, the small form factor, UI performance etc.) there are way cheaper single chip solutions, f.ex.:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summ ary.jsp?code=MXC275-30&nodeId=01m6cy9280

The specs tell it all:

http://www.freescale.com/files/wireless_comm/doc/f act_sheet/MXC27530FS.pdf

Include the benefit is that this chip has Linux support out of the box, meaning a port of Darwin should not be rocket science.

Another good option would be the OMAP family from Texas Instruments. It is used in several phones already like the Nokia N93:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N93

This remains all speculation, sure. In the end someone will have to take apart this puppy to see the real deal...

They are listing several different pretty large chips along with a ARM9 core from Samsung which exists as IP only. Do you really think Apple would put together their own silicon if ready made solutions exist?

When looking at the iPhone feature list (GSM, EDGE, Quad band, WiFi, Bluetooth, Video and Audio playback, camera support, the small form factor, UI performance etc.) there are way cheaper single chip solutions, f.ex.:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summ ary.jsp?code=MXC275-30&nodeId=01m6cy9280

The specs tell it all:

http://www.freescale.com/files/wireless_comm/doc/f act_sheet/MXC27530FS.pdf

Include the benefit is that this chip has Linux support out of the box, meaning a port of Darwin should not be rocket science.

Another good option would be the OMAP family from Texas Instruments. It is used in several phones already like the Nokia N93:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N93

This remains all speculation, sure. In the end someone will have to take apart this puppy to see the real deal...

Most people are familiar with the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontrollers, similar to the Microchip 8-bit PIC microcontollers. The AVR32 is a 32-bit microcontoller. I believe it was developed by Atmel to be a easy to mirgrate to target to compete with Freescale's 32-bit offerings, and various manufacturers' low cost 32-bit ARM processors.

oops! http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summ ary.jsp?code=MMA7260QT There are some app notes below.

http://www.freescale.com/files/sensors/doc/data_sh eet/MMA7260Q.pdf

Integration is the key to cost reduction, performance improvement and power efficiency.

L2 cache used to be external. Then they integrated it when technology and performance allowed. L3 cache then became external while L2 was integrated; now you can buy processors with all this inside. Put the memory controller inside the CPU and you no longer need to spread out high (er than CPU core voltage) IO lines with nasty length requirements between Northbridge and CPU, and can clock the bus faster. Put the ethernet and so on inside the Northbridge and you no longer need discrete chips and buses for them, and can run them faster with tighter integration to a DMA controller and embedded RAM.

Integrate the graphics hardware into the CPU and you can have most of the high-bandwidth devices on the fastest possible bus.

Take Freescale's nearly-done 8641D Power Architecture processor. It's 2 G4s, 4 gigabit ethernet, USB2, PCI Express and RapidIO, DMA, interrupt and memory controller, I2C, serial. This chip is priced LOWER than equivalently specced Core Duo 2 combinations (CPU, i975MCH/ICH combination), and the performance.. is about the same. However board implementation will be much easier, and lower power. All you need for a system is to add your peripherals; a SATA chip, perhaps. I can't think of anything else that is missing besides graphics.

http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/fact_shee t/MPC8641DDLCRFS.pdf

Eventually SATA will go in there, you can bet on that. Then graphics. Then one chip per board is a possibility. You thought NanoITX was small..?

...deserve great software. I hope it's not been locked down too tightly so that we'll be able to replace the firmware.

What do we know about the Zune? Well, the first generation at least is apparently a rebadged Toshiba Gigabeat media player.
The rumors are that it runs Windows Mobile on a 400MHz DSP processor. This isn't strictly true because Windows Mobile doesn't run on DSP's - it only runs on ARM / XScale CPU's. However the Zune is likely to be similar to its close cousin the Gigabeat S. This uses the Freescale i.MX31 CPU. This is a 533MHz ARM11. It's not a huge leap of the imagination to think they'll use the same cpu or at least very close. If MS chose Toshiba as a partner for this its more than likely its because of their existing working product is a good starting point.

Given that, it's at least plausible you'll be able to run linux on the CPU. The only problem is hinted at in the FCC pics with the yellow sticker on the PCB stating "Fuse Blown". If you look at the it appears to have an eFuse on board making it as much a pain to re-flash as the Xbox. We'll see what happens I guess...

~Pev