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Rhombus Tech A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card Schematics Completed
lkcl writes "Rhombus Tech's first CPU Card is nearing completion and availability: the schematics have been completed by Wits-Tech. Although it appears strange to be using a 1ghz Cortex A8 for the first CPU Card, the mass-volume price of the A10 was lower than other offerings. Not only does the A10 classify as 'good enough' (in combination with 1GB of RAM), Allwinner Tech is one of the very rare China-based SoC companies willing to collaborate with Software (Libre) developers without an enforced (GPL-violating) NDA in place. Overall, it's the very first step in the right direction for collaboration between Software (Libre) developers and mass-volume PRC Factories. There will be more (faster, better) EOMA-68 CPU Cards: this one is just the first."
Too many links... no intro telling me what this is.
For those who want to know... it is a PCMCIA (PC-card) sized integrated computer designed to compete with the Raspberry Pi... supposedly cheaper and faster. Raspberry Pi does have one major advantage though: it is in production and shipping whereas this is still in the schematics stages. So... nothing to see here...
An odd number of cores. Perhaps they have 4 cores, each controlling 16 CPUs. Or 4 cores set aside for other purposes?
I guess having 2 other major manufacturers of chips is just way too many to keep track of or they'd have realized there's already chips called A8 and A10 from AMD. In fact, I think they just recently released A10 chips.
Some of the suppliers are shipping right now....others are playing games with ship dates.
If they just completed the schematic drawings this tells me that they are at least half a year away from production - if they are super good designers and if their prototype works right the first time they power it up.
The schematic is often the easiest part of the design. An EMC compliant PCB is usually harder; passing FCC/CE/* EMI compliance is harder; setting up for mass production is not for beginners either. Those guys just made the first step on a long road. And that's exactly why it's so hard to build hardware these days; the progress is so fast that by the time you are ready to manufacture the key parts are obsolete and out of production. Even if the parts are still available your design may be already obsolete because newer, better parts became available. It's either "design it under 3 months" or "do something else with your life."
It's an attempt to create a standardized form factor for open/modular highly portable inexpensive computing device CPUs. It intends to do for these markets what the AT/ATX motherboard/case design and ISA/PCI buses and Socket 3/5/7 did for the desktop computing market. Additionally, it is doing this with openness (libre open source software stack) clearly an important design criterion, besides the technical/performance ones.
Will it take time to mature? Yes. But less than one might think. It's farther along than might appear.
Will it therefore fail, by missing out on the window for Cortex A8? No. It's modular enough to continue even after the Cortex A8 CPU is obsolescent. The Allwinner A10 was chosen in part because it is currently available and cheap.
This will open up niche markets which the major manufacturers are not servicing. High-resolution debian ARM netbook? Can be done. 7" Netbook? Can be done. Pixel Qi Tablet? Can be done. Desktop ARM terminals? Can be done.
I've been following this project for a while now, and it is going in a direction which I believe in. I am getting tired of proprietary ARM hardware and software.
It's a schematic (actually, the picture shows a board layout)
shit. you're right. it is! no wonder the other guy said we'd be 6 months from release :) no, it's definitely a board layout. first samples will be available for testing by next week. definitely not 6 months from now.
It's not clear why you'd want an Allwinner A10 in a PCMCIA form factor. The Allwinner A10 has a sizable set of peripherals on-chip. Ethernet, HDMI, etc. Usually, boards for this part have a whole row of connectors. Bringing out the pins on a PCMCIA connector means you need another board to fan out the peripherals.
ah. right. this is covered here: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture
we wanted something that is user-installable and user-upgradeable. if we had wanted factory-installable (only) then we would a) not really have bothered at all, given the proliferation of offerings from direct-insight.co.uk and variscite.com and many many others b) we would have created something like the q-seven standard and, again, really to be honest, would not have bothered with that, either, because why create a competing standard?
no, you're missing a couple of points. one is that the A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card can operate stand-alone, powered by USB-OTG, booting from USB-OTG, NAND or Micro-SD as you choose, and having both HDMI out and Stereo Audio. that's not bad, right there.
the other point is that we picked interfaces that happen to be "common buses", that happen to all have backwards-compatible speed negotiation. 24-pin RGB/TTL you can drop down even to as low as 15 pin by ignoring the higher-res bits; you can reduce the clock-rate to run a 320x240 LCD or you can ramp it up to run 2048x2048 @ 30fps in full colour. USB2 goes all the way from 11mbit/sec to 480mbit/sec. SATA-II has down-level negotiation all the way to 150mbit/sec. I2C goes from something like 75khz up to 4mbit/sec or thereabouts. Gigabit Ethernet goes through 10 to 100 to 1000.
so there is a hell of a lot of thought gone into the selection of those interfaces, in order to keep the pin-count down. it was just pure luck that when you added 16 GPIOs and some power and ground that the pin-count came to *exactly* 68. jammy or what. and if you look at that interface set, it's *extremely* flexible and powerful. but i believe i know what you're saying: why didn't you make *all* the pins available? because if you've looked at the cost of user-hot-swappable 100-pin connectors, they're insanely expensive: $12 is not uncommon.
so instead, we're recommending the use of a low-cost STM32F on the other side (I/O Board side). we've tracked down the OpenEC2 project (originally the firmware for the OLPC XO-1) and intend to port it to RTEMS-lite, then extend it to provide Audio Drivers in the form of A/D and D/A converters, amongst other things. ST Micro actually recommend their 75mhz+ CPUs for use as Audio ICs. but it can pretty much cover everything. this practice is standard in x86 PCs (using an Embedded Controller) but is quite rare in the ARM world: normally you'd use the ARM CPU itself to do this job! but, because of the EOMA-68 "break", we can't do that. swings and roundabouts: it'll come out in the wash :)
I'll say. I've never even heard of this project until now (blame my ignorant remark on Slashdot not leading with even a little bit of backstory, as usual.)
sorry! my fault. i wrote the original submission. it's been a loooong road. i only just noticed that i'd said "schematics" rather than "board layout", thanks (sincerely) to someone's comments here. i kinda assumed that people had been following. and ironically got criticised for putting in too many links in the submission, already. imagine how many slashdotters heads would have melted if i'd done all their work for them by putting in some extra backstory links? :)
anyway: there's a bit more about the background, here: http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/52054-british-company-looks-to-create-cheap-open-platforms - pleaase for goodness sake ignore the mistaken reporting of a "$15" sale price.... but otherwise it's all good stuff.
Yeah I've been following this for a while as well. I was originally confused by the purpose of the PCMCIA card, but it eventually came through in my mind the idea that the PCMCIA card shaped object is just a REALLY EASILY replaceable motherboard that plugs in to a host device. Granted it's not a PCMCIA card, and it's not called a PCMCIA card.
I like the premise. Buy a barebones laptop shell, plug in the EOMA-68 card device, and boot up. Or plug it into some other type of form factor. Inside of a TV. Inside a media player device. Inside a tablet. So many options. This could be big.
Assuming this uses the Allwinner A10 chip, What is the status of decent hardware video decoding support?
Frankly the fact that they put gigabit ethernet on board is pretty awesome. That's not something that comes with the SoC.
If you did put it in a device shaped like a laptop, would you be able to add more ram, upgrade the wifi card, etc, like a normal laptop or are you stuck with what's on board? Not sure how the card deals with expandability.
Still, if this catches on, maybe RMS will finally be able to move up from his yeeloong lemote
Allwinner Tech is one of the very rare China-based SoC companies willing to collaborate with Software (Libre) developers without an enforced (GPL-violating) NDA in place
Allwinner Tech is the company behind the ARM-based SoC that have powered many many tablets and smartphones
And they only charge $7 per Cortex A8-SoC
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This SoC is not only produced but also designed in China. Most competitors are designed in Korea (Samsung) or the US (TI, Qualcomm?, Nvidia?)
Quite a number of SoC (among others) are designed in Israel, Japan and Germany as well
India had, at one time, the potential to become a very strong player in the field. But for some reason, that never came true
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Don't worry, just list them all out here
I've been here for a long while, and my brain has yet been melted
List them here, so at least you'll provide us with melt-proof brains a trip to the search engines
Thanks in advance !!
:) ok - that first story, the one on itwire, explains what the heck happened and why i started on this path at all. it was a GPL-violating laptop that, embarrassingly, i naively encouraged 20 people to buy the very first samples from a little china factory called "Chitech". i had no idea that the factory hadn't even been *supplied* with the source code, and assumed that they would supply it. when they wouldn't (because they couldn't) in order not to let down all the people i'd encouraged to buy the laptops i had to go into overdrive spending about a month working with frans pop, buy a hand-held oscilloscope and get out the soldering iron in order to reverse-engineer the hardware and create an alternative S3C6410 2.6.24 kernel and a debian installer for the device. at the same time i also began a GPL violations escalation which so unnerved the girls at the factory that they ceased working with the ODM who supplied the GPL-violating design. not entirely the result i was looking for, but hey.
anyway i'd been through this reverse-engineering saga before in 2004 with a bunch of HTC wince smartphones (i used to own 7 HTC smartphones!), so it wasn't as hard this time, but it sank in that this was an absolutely ridiculous way to go about things, and i decided to try to find people to work with to actually create the hardware *itself*. i then looked at modules (like the ones used in the GPL-violating laptop) and, on learning how expensive they were (usually $99-$150) decided there was no way this could succeed using modules.
i spoke about this to my friend and mentor and, slowly we morphed the idea into a mass-volume product, evaluating dozens of possible connectors for re-use, and patented the concept. for the first CPU card, we settled on PCMCIA, as it turned out to be perfect for re-use. also: it turns out that the client whom we've been advising has just taken on the automated assembly of some 20 million 3G PCMCIA modems for one of their customers. this was highly successful for them: they earned an *enormous* sum of money, and they gained the skill, equipment and confidence to make PCMCIA-card-sized devices.... just as we come along with a PCMCIA-sized computer and they're *also* looking to solve the problem of their unprofitable laptop business! ... talk about jammy, or what? :)
anyway, back to the story: we started looking for SoC vendors willing to work with us, even though we had no cash, and started selling the advantages of the story and the opportunity to help our very large mass-volume client and for people to make large wads of cash some time in the future, instead. we had this mad idea of the EOMA-68 CPU Card becoming a de-facto standard which SoC vendors could create as their first BSP, on the basis that it takes all the hard work out of getting any given CPU *literally* straight into a mass-production environment with no additional changes, and happens to be a good format as an engineering board (similar to the origen, imx53qsb, pandaboard etc.)
the funny thing is that over the past 2 years we've learned that it's actually *not* a good idea to encourage anyone to expect an up-front cash payment for "work done": it sends completely the wrong message. for example, we approached over a hundred factories around Shenzen, and asked them if they wanted to convert their products to EOMA-68. they didn't understand. they asked "how many our tablet you want buy?" quite a lot. on average it took about 20 messages to get across to them that we wanted to partner with them. we help improve their products, we supply software services at zero cost and introduce them to our clients on a commission-basis, if they modify the products to our hardware spec without charging us. win-win
"Sure they're "twice the price", but for many people thats still spare change in reality."
for most people on this planet, $25 is a large amount of money
They do, I admit, make hardware of excellent build quality.
Meh. I've experienced direcely, or through friends, numerous build flaws.
They have a bit of a fetish for thinness and style, and this often trumps build quality. The examples I can think of off the top of my head:
Around 2006 I used to live at altitude (7200 feet). The air is thinner and the fans have to work harder. Pertty much everyone on site with a MBP had the fans conk out after a year since they were underpowered for the job. The on-site mac repair team had a huge stock of apple fans since this was such a problem. Pretty much all other laptops had no problem.
The 1st gen air had a tendency to blow out the back hinge because the bit of metal they used was simply too thin.
The 2x previous generation of magsafe adapter was made too small (WTF it was tiny already) and the cable mount was not secure enough and they had a tendency to break.
The towers are very solidly built with excellent thermal design, which I approve of. The main problem with normal PCs is that ATX motherboards are very poorly designed from a thermal perspective, and it's hard to get good air channels etc. However, they are dense and the penalty with a Mac Pro is that you can't fit very much stuff into the case.
The monitors are just plain poor IME. I had oldish twin 30" cinema displays at work (before I changed jobs), inerited from a guy who left. They were bad in a variety of ways. One is, astonishingly, that they seemed to suffer from some kind of burn in (I didn't think LCDs did that). If you put a constant colour background on them, you could see huge variations across the screen. Also, in the irritating fetish for design, they had only one single VDI input on the end of a long cable. That made switching between laptop and desktop an exercise in crawling under the table. Not cool.
Also, for some bizarre reason, nulike every other manufactuer under the planet, they decided not to bother with the analog pins on the DVI cable. Bear in mind that when the monitor was sold, they were still shipping Mac minis with intel graphics and therefore analog only output. This meant that my laptop (before I switched) was unable to display on the monitors.
Frankly, having experienced quite a bit of mac and other hardware, I think the "excellent build quality" think is a bit of a myth.
SJW n. One who posts facts.