New PPC/Linux PDA Reference Design From IBM

kinema writes "It looks like IBM has released a new Linux/PowerPC based PDA reference design called e-LAP ("embedded Linux application platform"). It features a PowerPC 405LP, 30MB SDRAM, 32MB NOR Flash, 64MB Disk-On-Chip Flash, 240 x 320 color LCD, Stereo speakers, Microphone, USB (both host and client ports), a 3000 gate Xilinx FPGA, SDIO slot and last but not least a TCPA security chip. I for one would love to see some good PowerPC based PDAs on the market."

Comments

PowerPC Advantages?

[SoCalChris]

I for one would love to see some good PowerPC based PDAs on the market.

Why? Aren't PowerPC chips more expensive? Is there a major benefit that I'm not seeing? Why wouldn't they run a Linux version on it with a regular PC chip and be able to sell the device cheaper?

Re:PowerPC Advantages?

[RupW]

Why wouldn't they run a Linux version on it with a regular PC chip and be able to sell the device cheaper?

You mean an x86? They eat too much power to use portably.

There are a couple of low-power x86 compatibles - the Transmeta Crusoe and VIA Epic - but don't know if they're low power enough. Plus they're someone else's technology whereas PowerPC is IBM's own.

Re:PowerPC Advantages?

[kwoo]

Why? Aren't PowerPC chips more expensive? Is there a major benefit that I'm not seeing? Why wouldn't they run a Linux version on it with a regular PC chip and be able to sell the device cheaper?

For one, IBM has a large hand in the development of the PowerPC, and I can't say I blame them for wanting to use one of their own chips. In terms of real advantages, the PowerPC has a few in general, but I'm not sure about the embedded series of chips.

From a programming perspective PowerPC can be somewhat annoying (I believe you can only load 16 bits of a register at a time -- I read that in an IBM DeveloperWorks article, I believe) if you're writing assembly, but I find it a wonderful platform for my daily projects (Darwin/PPC and Linux/PPC mostly).

Re:PowerPC Advantages?

[questionlp]

Considering that the 405LP that is being used in the reference design could be considered an embedded processor, it's also less complex than say the lowest power consumption x86 or x86-compatible processor. It's also hard to find a x86 processor that has a typical power consumption of under a watt and has all of the features of the 405LP, plus fit into the space requirements of handhelds and other small devices.

Price isn't as much of a concern since you would normally trade cost for portability, and vice versa.

The other benefit of the PPC architecture is the fact that you don't have the kludge of an ISA that is the x86 ISA... meaning that developing apps for a PPC (or an ARM) architecture may not be as bad... and I think code written for the PPC architecture can run on any other PPC processor, provided that you don't include processor specific extensions.

Re:PowerPC Advantages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article. Notice that it mentions that the PowerPC 405LP chip not only contains a PPC 405 core, but a substantial number of other devices. DDR Controller, DMA Controller, LCD Controller.. and a myriad of others important ones. This significantly reduces the number of chips a manufacturer needs to put in a device, with the result of dramatically reduced cost.

Also, anecdotal "PowerPC chips are more expensive" _may_ hold for the PC market, but remember that this is a radically different chip geared for a radically different market (the article mentions a top speed of ~380 MHz!). In reality, IBM has priced this particular chip very reasonably -- wholesale price $100. Those numbers ought to be available soon.

Development of this chip was on Linux right from the beginning, and people were using them around the lab as MP3 players throughout! A great platform for hacking around with.

Re:PowerPC Advantages?

[mlyle]

This is a typical artifact of RISC chips. Instructions are fixed size, and usually the same size as the general purpose registers. When you load from an immediate value (a value contained in the instruction), the instruction has insufficient room for a value as wide as the instruction itself after specifying the instruction, the destination operand, etc.

Isn't This...

[Aknaton]

the point where some asshole pipes in about how he could buy a 100Ghz P4 for the same about of money?

lower power consumption

[ChristTrekker]

That's the most obvious one that comes to mind. That translates to longer battery life. If I had to pay a bit more money (and I'm not sure that your "more expensive" claim is true) in order to have more "on the go" time, it might be worth it.

Re:lower power consumption

[dietlein]

IBM says that the 405LP has good power management features (see link). I tend to agree with them, but also with the parent who says that this won't be the cheap solution for everyone.

The 405LP PR

Re:lower power consumption

[Ctrl-Z]

Really? I would think that the most obvious answer is that PowerPC is an IBM product. If you're going to build a design spec, then you might as well make sure it lines your own pockets.

The fact that it has lower power consumption is a nice "public" explanation.

Re:lower power consumption

[Klaruz]

Intel: Reference design uses XScale
IBM: Reference design uses PPC

YOU: Pick one you like best. Weigh all factors, cost, features, speed, power consumption. There ARE differences.

More choice is always good.

Re:lower power consumption

[Phroggy]

A thought about lower power consumption as it relates to price:

Say an Intel Mobile P4 costs $X and runs at a certain speed (not MHz, but actual performance). However, when you unplug it to run on batteries, performance drops in half, to save battery usage.

Say a PowerPC chip costs $(1.5 * X) and runs at the same speed while running on AC power, but when you unplug it and run on batteries, it doesn't cut performance because power usage at full speed matches the P4 at half speed. So, you get the same battery life from both, but the PPC costs more. When both chips are running at full speed, they're the same speed, but when the P4 is at half speed to conserve batteries, the PPC is much faster.

Now, use a slower model of PPC that costs less to produce. Drop the price down to match, and (when the P4 runs at half speed to get decent battery life) the PPC is faster.

In a laptop, speed while running on AC power may be important, so yes, the PPC may be more expensive for the same speed. But in a PDA, that's not important at all, so the PPC has the advantage.

This is why Apple has started pushing laptops this year. There may be faster PC laptops while plugged in, but while unplugged, PowerBooks are either much faster or have much longer battery life.

Disclaimer: I don't actually know what I'm talking about and anything I said that looks like numbers was completely made up arbitrarily. ;-)

Re:lower power consumption

[Hank the Lion]

XScale is just the ARM compatible processor of Intel. GCC supports it.

Re:lower power consumption

[larkost]

Actually, in power saver mode the PowerPC family of processors varies its timing to try and save energy. If you do something demanding (say a lot of IO involved in DVD playback) the processor stays in its most 'awake' mode. If you start to use less processor power (have increasingly more no-op cycles) then it starts to slow down timings and turn off function units. Start to need more power and it starts to ramp back up. The biggest problem is that somtimes you need a lot of cycles in a sudden burst after doing nearly nothing for a while, and this takes a bit of time to wake up all the way.

All in all a much better solution than the 'if I am unpluged then drop to half performance' routine uses by the non-mobile version of the P4 that is used in high performance PC laptops.

The developer sled

[kwoo]

I am really looking forward to this unit, in part because of the developer sled. The ability to hack a handheld device is of utmost importance to me, as there are so many specialized uses for them. It is nice to see a unit with that sort of hacking convenience.

I also noticed that one of the host USB ports is disabled. Would that be for power saving, or is it a limitation of the chipset? If it's for power saving, would one be able to enable it when one has a use for it?

Apple PDA

[coolgeek]

Well, this should be enough to re-ignite the iWalk rumors again.

crazy

[tps12]

Wow, great to see IBM getting into the PDA market. For those who don't remember, they pretty much set the gold standard in the laptop industry, and we still live with the benefits today. But while this sounds like a good toy for geeks, I have to wonder about some of the choices made in the design of this device.

PDAs typically use processors designed specifically for embedded environments. They're built from the ground up for low power consumption in preference to blazing speed. The PowerPC is exactly the opposite, as anyone who has sat down at a recent G4 can tell you -- these things scream.

Furthermore, Linux is specifically architectured for the server market, which is why it's seen so much success in the enterprise. Trying to tweak it to run on a PDA is an excercise in feudalism. The choice could also be bad news for Linux, as people will start to think of the OS as suitable for only small devices.

It's a good idea, but I'd like to see them take a more sensible approach.

Re:crazy

[octover]

>For those who don't remember, they pretty much set the gold standard in the laptop industry, and we still live with the benefits today.

and now Apple is leading the pack with the Powerbooks. Now if only Steve Jobs would relent and give us an update to the Newton.

Re:crazy

[qwijibrumm]

I think you miss the whole point of the powerPC architecture. The fact of the matter is powerPCs were designed to be extremely scaleable. They are all over the place in systems you would never know. The best example I can think of is the electronic control unit in many cars. It just happens that the powerPCs you hear about the most are Motorola's G4s, IBM's Power970, etc. The whole concept of the powerPC is to have a powerful unified processor "backbone" for anything from a blender to a rackmount server.

Re:crazy

[Ami Ganguli]

The PowerPC is exactly the opposite, as anyone who has sat down at a recent G4 can tell you -- these things scream.

This is an embedded version. It shares design elements with your G4 processor, but it's not nearly the same thing.

Linux is specifically architectured for the server market

Nope, it was designed for Linus Torvald's desktop '386 - a machine that was considerably less powerful than this device. Since then a lot of work has gone into scaling it both up and down.

Here's the IBM press release

[dietlein]

Here is the official IBM press release.

Intriguing...

[snStarter]

Good to see more options out there in general. But I wonder if this means we might see an OS X version from Apple.

Power/Battery Life

[1010011010]

How does the power consumption of this type of ARM chip compare to the Arm, StrongArm, XScale and Dragonball CPUs?

I wouldn't buy anything with a TCPA chip or DRM

[MrJerryNormandinSir]

Just another product to boycot.
TCPA + DRM = crippleware

I prefer my Zaurus anyway. I can surf the net via
802.11, I've got a big ass 256MB MMC card.
And some some apps I serve off my LinuxPPC (Apple 9600) Server. I built my own amplified stereo speakers. No TCPA or DRM technology embedded in it.
And it's plenty fast enough to stream mpeg2 and mpeg4 video off my server!

If IBM removes the DRM technology maybe they'll
get some market share. But anything with TCPA and DRM technology is just crippleware in my eyes. This would probably start a home brew revolution.

We should stick together any never but any hardware that supports DRM.

Re:FPGA?

[llamafresh]

Field Programmable Gate Array

I learned a bit about these when I was in college...when set up right, they are much faster than microprocessors, and can be changed on-the-fly by writing new array logic to it.

Future DRM?

That would be the TCPA chip, my friend. Palladium anyone?

llamafresh

Re:PowerPC + PDA == ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This PowerPC-based PDA is as close as we're going to come to an Apple handheld for a long time!

Why?

Has Apple announced it's not going to make a PDA? They've got laptop expertise from the ti-book, small portable commodity electronics expertise from the iPod, etc.

developer sled

[SonOfSengaya]

From http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9222005703.html

-----
Additionally, a plug-in "developer sled" adds the following options, for development and debug purposes . . .

USB 1.1 host

10/100 Ethernet

Serial port

8- or 16-bit PCMCIA slot

JTAG debug port

Flash programming port -----

DOA

[bstadil]

IBM Semiconductor has no concept of supporting smaller volume makers, and the Bill of Material for this reference design will be more than $300.

Just look at the POP reference design they made a few years back. Nobody I mean Nobody ever produced a single board. The fact that they used a virtual non existant Northbridge didn't help.

Nothing to see here Move On, or call IBM and try and get a quote for 500 pcs PowerPC if you doubt me.

Re:PowerPC Advantages? Power Consumption...

[dietlein]

From http://www.ibm.com/ibm/environment/annual2002/prod uct.shtml:

The first product to emerge from the Low-Power Computing Research Center is the low-power 405LP chip, which enables system software to control and reduce active power by dynamically scaling processor performance to the level required to support the application. Wherever possible, the 405LP offloads processor demands by use of hardware accelerators and aggressively shuts off portions of the device when not in use. Standby power is also reduced. The 405LP includes a mode in which power is reduced virtually to zero while still providing "instant-on" response to an external stimulus, such as a pen stylus on a touch screen.

Re:FPGA?

[Obsequious]

Could be "scratch space", or for future DRM as you point out. I like to think it'll be for more though.

Someday I'd like to see FPGAs in all sorts of things. The classic (albeit somewhat silly) example I like to use is you're driving down the road and you go through a puddle of water which disables your car's computer. So you download the controller core from GM's (or whoever's) site, load it into the FPGA on your PDA, and use it to drive to a service shop.

Kind of a contrived example, but my ultimate point is that with pervasive FPGAs, and perhaps some kind of pervasive "universal connector" wired to the FPGA, you can reconfigure a device to do things it wasn't specifically designed for.

Blue sky thinking aside, I can think of other uses for it, such as the "cell phone" model where you alternatively use it for digital and analog control stuff by reprogramming it. That way you only need one part in the device instead of two, and it makes interconnection circuitry simpler.

You might also program it to be a DSP-microprocessor today (for maybe the media player or something), and then reprogram it to be the cell chip for a Treo-like device tomorrow.

That kind of thing...

Not bad -- but give me my Zaurus!

[rjamestaylor]

I like the reference spec but still prefer my Zaurus 5500 and really prefer the (Intel-delayed) 5600. The case ergonomics are one reason (the built-in thumbboard is awesome on the Zaurus).

Don't think, though, these are PDAs. These are not really Palm competitors. These are true development platforms for handheld computing solutions. Also, the killer app on these is the web browser. Opera 5 (and I'm playing with a beta of 6) is incredibly fast and feature rich, especially compared to PokeyIE on PokeyPC or anything on the Palm (though I haven't seen OS 5.0 to be honest).

I love taking my Zaurus to a HotSpot (like T-Mobile's at the ubiquitous Starbucks) surfing, SSH'ing, web serving (from the unit), and...well...playing Scrabble ("Word Game").

Maybe Scrabble is the killer app...Anyway...

Not an FPGA - it is a CPLD

[brandido]

The reference in the post and in the article to a Xilinx XCR3128XL FPGA is incorrect - the XCR3128XL is actually a Xilinx CPLD. While both are reconfigurable, the primary difference between an FPGA and a CPLD is that an FPGA is SRAM based, and must be programmed each time it is turned on, while a CPLD is Flash based, and can keeps its configuration between power cycles. Additionally, FPGAs tend to have more logic and more features.

Re:I've literally got to ask!

[Phroggy]

Can it play Ogg Vorbis files?

Running Linux on PowerPC? Why not?

One of the issues with Ogg support, as I understand it, is that until recently there wasn't a good Ogg decoder that didn't require floating-point operations, and many embedded chips don't handle float. The PowerPC handles float just fine.

PowerPC's major market is embedded devices

[MyNameIsFred]

Don't forget that the major market for PowerPCs is embedded devices. One of the reasons Apple has lagged in the MegaHertz war is that Motorolla sells many more embedded CPUs then desktop CPUs. Since users of embedded CPUs generally are more interested in power consumption then speed, you can guess where Motorolla has focused.

Re:FPGA?

[PetiePooo]

I'm hoping the FPGA will be a resource that can be allocated just like memory. That would make it a great solution for implementing DSP-based . A media player could reserve the FPGA, load the MP3 codec into the FPGA and start feeding it the compressed bitstream. When a different bitstream comes along (let's say Ogg?), clear out the current codec and pop in the new one. Meanwhile, your processor load stays close to zero because all the number-crunching is going on in programmable hardware!

DRM software could use the FPGA in conjunction with the TCPA chip for access control. However, the TCPA chip has much less nefarious uses as well, such as hardware encryption/decryption and secure key storage to name a couple. If a newer, better encryption algorithm comes along, it could be implemented in the FPGA, making this platform extremely future-proof.

I wish IBM the best in this. It sounds like a truly marvelous platform.

Actually, probably better, I'd trade my Zaurus

[Hanno]

I own a Zaurus and I am not really that thrilled with it.

The Sharp Zaurus has several disadvantages that the IBM reference design appears to avoid.

First and foremost, the Zaurus uses a non-standard connector. I wasn't looking hard, but I doubt that I can buy the connector in a shop for electronics parts, and I consider that a major problem. It already was a problem for the Palm.

A simple serial or USB cable costs a whopping 40 Dollars in the US and 50 Euros in Europe.

Then, the Zaurus features USB, but only as a device, not as a host. Oh, the thousands of possibilities that the Zaurus designers gave away with this design decision! If, oh, if only they had incluced full host support for USB! I for one would love to simply plug in a USB keyboard in my Zaurus and start typing. (I'm aware of the power consumption issues with USB host support. But that's a question of adding a battery, that's it.)

So, to use an external keyboard, I'd have to buy a 50 Euro serial cable and an expensive keyboard that uses RS232, which is also hard to find and hard to get from Europe.

Or, I can get an IRDA keyboard. Which practically doesn't exist. Well, there are two companies offering an IRDA keyboard, but one of them appears to be vaporware and the other one does not work well with the Zaurus.

Then, the Zaurus' use of an obscure ethernet-over-USB protocol gave me quite a headache. Both the Windows 98SE and the Linux desktop drivers used to crash frequently, with the Linux driver being close to unusable, at least on my machine. It seems to be working perfectly now with 2.4.20, but it was a royal pain with previous kernels. So to use my Zaurus, I had to install XP. Yay. Which still crashes now and then as a result of using the Zaurus cradle and sometimes hard-resets the desktop the moment I put the Zaurus in there.

Finally, the Zaurus' handwriting recognition stinks. I learned Graffiti in 15 minutes, I still haven't mastered the Zaurus input method for handwritten letters. In fact, I still keep my Palm for the "actual" calendar and address management and use the Zaurus mostly for games: The SCUMM virtual machine is my personal killer app. Right now, I'm playing Monkey Island 1 during the bus rides to my office and back.

The Zaurus was the first useful Linux PDA, but it has some serious design mistakes. The missing USB host is the main mistake in my opinion. Can't wait to see the IBM reference design catching market share.

Best part appears to be: Zaurus applications' source should be easily ported to the IBM platform. And the Zaurus collection of ported software is already impressive.

QTopia/Zaurus compatibility?

[Simon Brooke]

It looks to me from the pictures as it the machines is running Trolltech's QTopia palmtop environment, just like the Sharp Zaurus. This is good from at least two points of view. Firstly it means it's easy to port the existing software for the Zaurus, and relatively easy to port KDE and other Qt based apps; and secondly because it means that people producing software for Linux palmtop devices get a wider market with a consistent UI look-and-feel.