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Single-Chip Linux Computer
goombah99 writes "Axis Computer has announced a single-chip Linux-based computer that integrates 2MB Flash, 8MB SDRAM and an Ethernet transceiver into a single chip with a 27mm x 27mm footprint. 'Just add power to the chip and you have a Linux computer with network connection.' It runs the Linux 2.4 kernel without any patches. The announcement says the chip is 'available' but the tech specs are labeled as preliminary, and the order form on the web site is broken, so it's hard to confirm if it is out yet or not. Some specifications in html and pdf are available at the company's web site."
Common, even my 4/86 had more memory!? And how do they expect me to compile gnome2 on this? *duh*
Life sucks.
Add some BlueTooth and you might finally have a decent platform to run all those household appliances you've been wanting to network at home. Interesting possibilities at least...
But what would the uses be? Is it meant for embedded devices? That would sound like an interesting idea, having a Linux computer in each VCR and toaster... Someone could then set up a crond job to "cat /dev/heat > /mnt/toast" every morning.
but really, serial ports? parallel ports? i'm not too sure that the scsi is going to win them any points either, but what the hell. they might have well integrated a video controler, an audio controler, and a 9600 baud modem to boot!
Well, I think they target embedded applications and not laptops here. Most embedded applications don't need sound or video capabilities and most engineers love to have serial and parallel I/O, because of their simplicity.
Also from the article..
The overall approach is one suited for connectivity rather than computation, supports data transfer rates of up to 200 Mbit/s (100 Mbit Ethernet full duplex), as well as a wide range of network device applications.
At only 100MIPS, I wouldn't want to use it in a laptop/notebook. Intel, AMD and Transmeta make better chipc for that. This one wouldn't have the computational power.
Great technology, yes. It would make a rockin' embedded system, and could serve up static web pages fast enough to saturate a 100MB pipe. I'll be keeping an eye on it for any future applications I can dream of..
I'd agree on the parallel port complaint, but a lot of stuff out there that won't be going away for years still uses serial ports. I'm not a programmer, but I'd wager that good ol RS232 is a simpler interface to work with than USB and probably more robust over longer runs. I don't think something like this was designed for replacing your desktop.
So many complaints about the "obsolete" hardware - FUCKING DUH! It's a system-on-a-chip, running a common OS that is relatively easy to write software for, using tried-and-true peripheral technology and with enough horsepower to be used in all manner of embedded systems.
Sure, you wouldn't use it in a laptop or even a PDA, but that's not the target -- it can be used anywhere you need a simple PC to do simple tasks, but you don't want the huge and power-hungry old 386 you've got sitting in your closet/warehouse.
The thing's running Linux and is capable of networking for fuck's sake. Use your imagination.
What was posted...
"goombah99 writes "Axis Computer has announced a single chip Linux based computer that integrates 2MB Flash, 8MB SDRAM and an Ethernet transceiver into a single chip with a 27mm x 27mm footprint. 'Just add power to the chip and you have a Linux computer with network connection.' It runs the Linux 2.4 kernel without any patches. The announcement says the chip is 'available' but the tech specs are labeled as preliminary, and the order form on the web site is broken, so it's hard to confirm if it is out yet or not. Some specifications in html and pdf are available at the company's web site."
What most non-Slashdot folks see...
"yak yak yak writes "Computer blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah computer blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. The announcement says the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah order form on the web site is broken, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah company's web site."
Reference: http://www.wonderdog.com/farside.htm
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This sounds like an excellent chip to use when building networking hardware. I want one for my toaster!
And no, it is not aimed at notebooks or desktops you imbecills!
HTTP/1.1 400
Still,given the feature set and the low power consumption this is a pretty appealing package, but I think even the embedded the applications are somewhat limited.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
In embedded world, you want minimalistic hardware. USB requires a microcontroller with USB stack just to talk to it. It is far easier to use serial port and probably 3 lines of code to talk to a serial port. Parallel port can be interfaced pretty much directly to keypad, small character LCD, relays etc. Can'tt say the same for USB without yet another microcontroller.
I am about to work on an FPGA single chip computer. Taking an open MIPS(ish) core and connecting it up to some peripherals.
The best thing about its is that it will be completely open.
Opencomputer will start as an FPGA but I am hoping to find a good excuse to manufacture it along with an asynchronous version and make my self a fully open PC.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
It runs the Linux 2.4 kernel without any patches.
Just to break out the tinfoil, how do we know? I think that if I were to make Linux work on a device my company produced, I'd claim it worked without any patches, and thus only point people to a vanilla source, and not have to release any of my changes for my competitors to see. I'm no fan of the GPL (and bash it regularly), but this seems like a viable tactic. Saying that you can't get the code to work on their chip doesn't seem like much in the way of indisputable evidence that they altered the code, either.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
You couldn't even fit the Windows bootstrap program on this thing, much less the web browser that is integral to the OS.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
It doesnt want to say what processor it is.
All I can see is that it is a RISC (what isnt) and has 15 x 32bit registers.
Sounds like an ARM ut why dont they say so.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Wouldn't it be better if they cloned a penguin and then inserted the uber linux brainchip?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
It is available.
The chip itself is $40. The eval board for the ETRAX 100LX is available for $299 as well as a version with bluetooth for $495.
Finally, the order page for both of these is at https://www.axis.com/shop/technology.htm.
--Tim
It's probably a crazy idea, but at 27x27mm you could fit over 50 of these on an atx PCB. And that's still 2D, stacked you could easily fit a hundred in a litre (though heat may be a problem even with embedded harware like this one).
Of course, compared to desktop computers these tinies have far from impressive specs (see: rants by others), but power isn't necessesarily measured in terms of Mhz/GBs. Power can come in numbers as well. And in that case, price per piece is more important, as well as Watt/instruction and physical size.
Now let's see about bulk prices...
---
The prospects for high-end PCs are far overrated
With a name as suggestive as Axis, how long until Dubya decides to carpet bomb them?
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We'd be talking real power...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Folks,
This Axis announcement is GREAT news!! This isn't motherboard announcement, nor a single board computer announcement. This chip running Linux is about a square inch!! I've spoken to the product manager about this MCM (multichip module) and decided to teach a seminar in March using it. See my website for specific information on January 2nd.
Why a seminar?? OEM pricing for this chip and future generations (more flash and RAM) will be less than $50 US. Probably around $35 after production is going. When developers get the power of Linux with a simple hardware interface to the real world, there will be an explosion of embedded Linux devices. This chips makes it simple: add power, an clock and you're off. I'm teaching a seminar so that I'll become familiar with the chip and let others in on this great new product.
Where's my toaster??
Hey do you want to ski, snowboard, ice climb and learn about the power of this Axis chip? Contact me.
Craig
Dr. Craig Hollabaugh
craig@hollabaugh.com
Author of Embedded Linux, www.embeddedlinuxinterfacing.com
from the specifications page
...
ETRAX 100LX has almost everything you need included
* 32 bit 100MIPS RISC CPU core
* 10/100 MBit Ethernet controller
* 4 asynchronous serial ports
* 2 synchronous serial ports
* 2 USB ports
* 2 Parallel ports
* 4 ATA (IDE) ports
* 2 Narrow SCSI ports (or 1 Wide)
* Support for SDRAM, Flash, EEPROM, SRAM,
Just add power and and ethernet connection.
Quite an impressive package. Though in practice you would need to add more memory. But think about it, in the space of about 1/2 cubic inch you could cram memory, the chip, plus say a Microdisk. Expand that to the size of an IPOD and you could put in a lot of stuff, incuding the power supply
I'm not exactly how fast 100MIPS when comparing a RISC to say and Intel CISC that takes many clock cycles to complete on instruction. I'm assuming its probably slower than a 2 Ghz Pentium, but fast for an hand held.
<b>What Gets interesting is this: it dissipates 0.35 watts (typical)!!!!! </b>Let me say that again. It dissipates 0.3 Watts for 100MIPS. compare that to a typical Pentium Computer in the hundreds of watts range for a Gigahertz. This means you could have 600+ in a single 1U chasis dissipating the same amount of heat.
Time to really start thinking about parrallel software and computer deisgn. For easily paprlizable problems 600 of these ina 1U would destroy an entire rack of Pentiums while disspating so little power this could be just slipped under your desk, not in cooled computer room. Oh did one of the chips burn out--who cares, there's only 599 more.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
- Put a web/cgi server in your VCR/DVD/Tivo. Maybe real people can finally program these things!
- Instrument other consumer systems (plumbing, hvac, weather, kitchen, etc.) with LAN-connected controllers. httpd when a human wants to interact directly. X10 on steroids.
This chip shows where the embedded market is heading. Very low chip cost, standards based IO and OS will get us lots of interesting options.Fiat Lux.
"Ooooooohhh BABY YES! wash and blend"
I just wish I had some mod points for you, man... You made my morning....
-cheers
...and ethernet. Perfectly for building small routers (2 WANs 1 LAN, at least). I have seen routers with much more limited hardware (Motorola's QUICC, for instance, which lack a MMU)
The title is misleading. The device is a multi-chip-module, not a single chip computer. They have packaged a number of chips in a very small package, but it is not a single chip. A MCM will cost more to manufacture than a true single chip computer because it requires a ceramic substrate to be manufactured with very small trace widths connecting the chips that are placed on the substrate.
Damned, and I always thought that Christmas was in July....
Only it would work without having to plug in modules through out the house and with much greater intelligence. Forget scanning the milk, how about the fridg lets me know when it has been standing open for 15 minutes because someone in the house can't seem to shut it. I'd also like to know when the coffee is done brewing. Just send a IM to me so I can go to the kitchen. You don't need to be rich to make use of this kind of tech, just lazy.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This looks like something that could be interesting, as building Intel PCs is so easy that it is boring.
Still, even if I bought one, I have no idea how what to mount it in or how to power it. You can't just throw it into an ATX case, can you?
I've got a Bun coffee brewer, which has a hot water resevoir in it. You dump a pitcher of water into it, and it flushes the existing pre-heated water through instantly. It only takes 2 minuts to get a pot of coffee. So, first thing I do is start the coffee, then by the time my toast pops up, it's done.
I really wonder why they're so very, very silent about what architecture they're actually using for the CPU. "32bit RISC CPU" - well, fine. But what is it?
Heck, you don't even find out about this "RISC" part before you click through several other pages of information. Why do they obviously try to make it such a secret?
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Speaking from an embedded-device perspective, this is heaven in a tiny package. Forget video and audio, the sync serial ports and ethernet are all I need!
If you're looking at a small desktop (that seems to be the direction of your comments), I think the Via C3 processor on a mini-ITX board is the direction you ought to go. Works wonderfully with Linux.
I don't think this is flambait at all. I think the excessive number of connectors one need on a computer is part of the inefficiency of the industry.
For instance, at at time when a Macs needed a single ADB port for all slow input devices, an Intel machine had two identical ports, for keyboard and mouse. These ports had to be color coded because they were not interchangeable. People hasted the few ports, but the standard made the machine easier to deal with and design for, even if a bit more expensive.
Likewise why have serial and parallel ports on a computer. Just make everyone use serial. It is not difficult, it is no longer expensive. I mean nearly everyone has switched to USB. What was the problem? I know that we need to support legacy hardware, but the poster has a point. Why bloat clearly niche device with things people no longer need or use.
But my real issue is with these printers and scanners that are shipped with two or three different ports. Is it really so expensive to replace the ports with and ethernet connector, at least on some of the machines. Most people have ethernet connector, and combined with a router with a DHCP server, these are easier to setup than a parallel or serial connection. I know not everyone has a router, but many people and most business have broadband, and selling broadband with a router, is, in my mind, irresponsible, but that is another rant.
Anyway, I agree with the poster. Don't put stuff in a product just because you can and it is cheap.
rant off
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
For a project I worked on at Keio Univ. in Japan, we ordered some of the Axis web cams, which use an older
version of the same chip, as well as some of the developer boards.
The system works as advertised; developing software and
deploying it is very easy, you just do a "make" in the source directory on your host, and it builds the flash rom image, and you download it via ethernet with a single command. You can ftp over to the board to upload binaries or other files, and there's a telnet client.
The only problems I had with the dev board were that it doesn't really have much useful I/O on it.
It has three serial ports and 16 bit parallel port, which can be used as an IDE drive or USB port, but at the time we got the system, you had to kind of roll your own interface. And at the time the drivers for the parallel port weren't
shipping standard so I had to write my own kernel
driver for it.
This is not to say that the designation means much any more... people have discovered how to make the most horrendous instruction sets (read: x86) go fast with only a million (!) extra transistors or so. This CPU doesn't have those, but what matters is that it's fast enough.
Still, it's amusing because half the complexity of the instruction set (and a substantial parcel of the chip) will never be exercised by any compiler. It's there as a sort of homage or shrine to machines from the days when programs were written in assembly language, and machines were marketed on how fancy the instruction set was, regardless of how it slowed the machine down.
The CDC machines were exceptional: Seymour Cray really understood. Also, in the '60s, some people at IBM built the 801, which evolved into the PowerPC. The rest of the industry didn't catch on until the Stanford RISC people made their big splash.
Right so. 2MB should be enough for anybody! ;-)
Red Hat should take notice, but still it's importatn that Red Hat is just as Linux as this tiny system is. And, there is a point in Linux being able to downsize into less than 2MB. Although Desktop Linux is not and does not allow for the same applications as embedded linux, there is a real virtue in sharing the codebase between these two. (Or desktop and webserver, cluster or grid server for that matter.) Although developers may not always agree on the direction the developments should take, together they provide for an open environment that is scaleble, and in escense is very lean. This is something Microsoft can never touch upon with Windows CE/PocketPC/whatever.
That's why I think this one-die embedded linux system is indeed a a-good-thing (tm).
This is the chip that I have been looking at for the last year and trying to get several systems built around it. Skip all the extra stuff.
All should have Power Over Ethernet (POE) and skip the different connectors.
All Systems: POE, CPU, Ram. 1'st System: 2 Compact Fash slots. This allows for either 2 disk drives or different devices. Howabout a CF ethernet so that it can become a firewall. Or a CF modem, so that it becomes a Fax Server, ppp server, or simply an interface to POTS. Or add the convertors for CF to IDE and run 2 2.5" HD (it will all fit inside the required 15 watts) or with extra power use it for network CD or DVD player.
2'nd system: provide a USB or Firewire interface. Skip the serial connectors. By providing 4-8 USB ports (with plugin power), this becomes a convertor of USB to TCP. This also allows for network Print serving, etc.
3'rd system: provide a small LCD screen, video chip and possibly Touch Screen input. Can be used for display Pixs, or small input around the house. Combine with the above, it can be used for irrigation, House temp controller, etc.
There are a number of interesting things that this chip can be used for. This is just a few.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
this is a far cry from ideal for a media PC.
The cpu has nowhere near enough processing power to perform multimedia functions, and this is deliberate.
The CPU/Board is intended to be used in embedded devices... things like routers and firewalls, etc; not for dvd players and game consoles.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Have a portmaster or other multi-serial-port box handle a serial-PPP connection with each mini-server. That way, you bypass the need for a bulky USB->ETHERNET adapter.
It has an embeded 100MbpsFdplx Ethernet interface. Why would you use either solution? My main concern would be finding a switch I could use to interconnect a bunch of them that wouldn't be larger than the collection of devices being interconnected.
Even with a Portmaster, 24 of these, along with a power supply to support them, would take up less space than the Portmaster required to interconnect them.
Another idea would be to interconnect via their own serial ports and build a mesh of devices. I have seen various reports of both two and three serial ports. Assuming three, you could fully mesh four devices, or partially mesh 5 or more devices. Using some learning software, you could then build up a physical nural net with each of these clusters communicating with other clusters via one, two, or more ethernet connections. Switching could be eliminated by using crossover connections between clusters. One device acts as a gateway in and out of the collection of clusters.
For communicating across the serial interface, a cell style protocol would probably work better as you are realy only sending data between two peer devices. The peer you send data to decides by the content of the data what to do next. Hand the data to someone else, send a response back to the original sender, modify the data and store it for comparison later, compare it against data from another source, whatever.
You could build a multiple input, multiple output banyan, or a matrix processing device. with arrays of input and output interfaces.
-Rusty
You never know...
Every specification for every semi-conductor device I've seen has always been marked "Preliminary". My HW co-workers told me, this is to protect the vendor and allow them to make any changes they see fit in the future.
One old crusty HW guy told me:
"They remove the prelminary mark when they obsolete the device"
=Shreak
Look at the complex addressing modes and variable-length instructions: hallmarks of a CISC. To quote chapter 2 of the documentation,
All in all, it's a pretty cute little system, although you'll definitely need to plan to interface it with other bits and pieces. The place I was working at was mostly dealing with Voice over IP (VoIP) applications, and so interfaced it with some telephony-style audio chips via one of the synchronous serial interfaces.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Just about everything out there has serial ports, including most Unix workstations, but not including Macs any more. Of course it's easy to get there from USB. Also USB has a very short maximum cable length, you can run (low speed) serial (9600 bps) over three wires of ordinary copper phone line for a LONG long way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For communicating across the serial interface, a cell style protocol would probably work better as you are really only sending data between two peer devices. The peer you send data to decides by the content of the data what to do next. Hand the data to someone else, send a response back to the original sender, modify the data and store it for comparison later, compare it against data from another source, whatever.
What is wrong with setting up some high-speed LEDs and fiber in/out connections? This would give you your maximum speed at a low price and plug-n-play setup. That seems the best way to make a multi-chip Linux array with minimal heat increase across the motherboard. Sure there would be the spaghetti syndrome between the parallel array, but the bonus would be minimal complexity in secondary information transfer.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
I would think that using LEDs to communicate would generate more heat than a copper trace. I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
Just so you know, X-10.COM is not the only place that sells X10 devices. Radio Shack and Leviton both make their own X10 devices and don't employ the same advertising campaign.