Rhombus Tech 2nd Revision A10 EOMA68 Card Working Samples

lkcl writes "Rhombus Tech and QiMod have working samples of the first EOMA-68 CPU Card, featuring 1GByte of RAM, an A10 processor and stand-alone (USB-OTG-powered with HDMI output) operation. Upgrades will include the new Dual-Core ARM Cortex A7, the pin-compatible A20. This is the first CPU Card in the EOMA-68 range: there are others in the pipeline (A31, iMX6, jz4760 and a recent discovery of the Realtek RTD1186 is also being investigated). The first product in the EOMA-68 family, also nearing a critical phase in its development, will be the KDE Flying Squirrel, a 7-in, user-upgradeable tablet featuring the KDE Plasma Active operating system. Laptops, desktops, game consoles, user-upgradeable LCD monitors and other products are to follow. And every CPU that goes into the products will be pre-vetted for full GPL compliance, with software releases even before the product goes out the door. That's what we've promised to do: to provide Free Software developers with the opportunity to be involved with mass-volume product development every step of the way. We're also on the look-out for an FSF-Endorseable processor which also meets mass-volume criteria, which is proving... challenging."

Comments

Definitions, please?

[gman003]

It's funny how, on articles about things everyone here knows about, like BitCoin or the Raspberry Pi, the summary wastes space explaining the context (ie. what BitCoin or RaspPi is), but on an article about something relatively obscure, it just throws model numbers and acronyms at you.

As far as I can discern without reading TFA, this is just some new ARM system-on-a-chip, not particularly revolutionary or powerful, but aimed at use in open-source environments.

Re:Definitions, please?

[AdamHaun]

As far as I can discern without reading TFA, this is just some new ARM system-on-a-chip

No, it's much sillier than that. This is the latest in a long-running series of Slashvertisements by the submitter, lkcl. They chronicle his journey towards creating an "industry standard" for swappable processors for tablets based on the PCMCIA form factor. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants it, and lkcl has next to no experience with hardware development, but he's convinced it's going to change the world! To help the world along, he's working on-- actually, it looks like various Chinese companies are doing all the work. Anyway, lkcl is the funding conduit for an example card based on an existing ARM SoC. Today's story is about getting the first samples of the "2nd revision" of this card. Future samples are approved for sale as a standalone product because "they boot", which obviously qualifies them to ship.

In our last episode, lkcl digressed from his main project to announce a funding drive for a totally unrealistic project to build a free software-friendly SoC with a custom CPU in six months without doing any "design" work. Except for speeding up the processor, adding a bunch of peripherals, and implementing it on a cutting-edge semiconductor process. And then getting to market by Christmas. Just a small side project, right?

lkcl is pretty prolific on his own stories, so I'm sure his dozens of comment responses will answer all of your questions.

Previous episodes:
Live Interview: Luke Leighton of Rhombus Tech Dec 11, 2012: Live interview that nobody saw. There doesn't seem to be a transcript.

Rhombus Tech A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card Schematics Completed Sept 7, 2012: PCB schematics (for the first revision -- prototype?) completed.

PCMCIA Computer Project Aims Even Higher (and Cheaper) Than Raspberry Pi Dec 17, 2011: Project announced? This is as far back as the Rhombus Tech news page goes.

Re:Definitions, please?

[lkcl]

It's funny how, on articles about things everyone here knows about, like BitCoin or the Raspberry Pi, the summary wastes space explaining the context (ie. what BitCoin or RaspPi is), but on an article about something relatively obscure, it just throws model numbers and acronyms at you.

As far as I can discern without reading TFA, this is just some new ARM system-on-a-chip, not particularly revolutionary or powerful, but aimed at use in open-source environments.

absolutely! i'm a link whore, what can i say :)

ok - it's not limited to one particular ARM SoC, it's about a standard. actually, it's not about the standard. the actual goal is to bring about a revolution in the mass-volume computing appliances sector. i don't mention that too often because it sounds absolutely madly insanely ambitious, but it's what's actually going on here.

so let's look a bit further down the chain, at say rhombus tech. rhombus tech is the web site designed to help link free software developers with chinese factories. if you're familiar with the rampant level of GPL violations (google "mjg59 android gpl violations") in the chinese hardware sector you'll know how limiting that is. i have two friends - both engineers - who are VERY frustrated at being able to buy such incredibly cheap hardware, yet they CANNOT RE-PROGRAM it because not even the factories have the GPL source code! so the promise of cheap hardware is there, but the reality is that you can't use it.

this insane situation is what rhombus tech is setting out to break, by ONLY working with factories and SoC vendors that are willing to be GPL compliant right from the start. my role here is therefore to pre-vet the SoCs, get the documentation and source code sufficient to at least get something up and running, find a substitute low-cost affordable development system (e.g. the Mele A1000 and now the Mele A100G Quad in the case of the Allwinner SoCs), then get it into modular form and get it out there.

the modular form-factor - which includes the development of standards such as EOMA68 - is the real kicker though. i don't know if you're aware of the situation with regard to development of tablets and other hardware but it's insane. due to the high level of integration on ARM and MIPS SoCs, EACH AND EVERY PRODUCT REQUIRES TOTAL CUSTOMISATION. there is no BIOS: there is only u-boot (which must be customised) and the linux kernel (which must be customised). the turn-around time on products is such that in some cases the introduction of a new SoC can cause a MAJOR recession in the electronics industry in Shenzen. it happened before when the Allwinner A10 came out, because its price was (is) only around $7.50 when all of its competition was around $13, and it'll happen again.

so we've come up with EOMA-68 as a way to mitigate against this (and other) problems. example: i received the PCB PADS files from Allwinner for the A31 SoC. i got a basic EOMA-68 layout done in FIVE DAYS because all i had to do was throw together a set of libraries and circuits that i already had from the other 4 boards that i've done. so with this approach we could basically upgrade an ENTIRE product range - tablets, laptops, desktop systems, anything-that-takes-a-CPU-card - in about 3 weeks flat. that's just... unheard-of! imagine going to a factory and saying "we can upgrade all your product in 3 weeks! all your base are belong to us!" they would be telling that story for years down at the local pubs, about the day some crazy guy came in and said they could upgrade their entire product range in 3 weeks... ... but that's literally what can be done here. do you see how powerful that is?

then there is the fact that the products, because they don't fundamentally change (it's only the CPU that gets faster), the factory can LITERALLY make them until the cows come home. or, more to the point, until a component goes end-of-life. but if they're making a 7in tablet chassis by the bucket-load,

Re:Definitions, please?

[lkcl]

Not only that, it's been done before: One of the Japanese companies (Sharp or maybe more likely Epson?) tried to push a PCMCIA-based CPU module back in the early '90s.

the difference here is that this is re-use. it's *NOT* backwards-compatible with PCMCIA. the idea of having a computer-that-can-dock-with-a-computer is great, but nowhere near as revolutionary. i did quite a long post to one of the other questions on here, which explains a bit more of the background: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3643131&cid=43435507

but yes, you're right: the EOMA-68 form-factor, which is credit-card-sized and 5mm in height, is a bit too big to put into devices such as smartphones, some of which are now only 6mm thick themselves! that's why we also created EOMA-CF which, surpriiise, re-uses Compact Flash. however that's *really* small, and will need us to finance the tooling as well as get access to SoCs that have Package-on-Package RAM and so on, so we made a conscious decision to focus on EOMA-68 first.

and that's fine, because EOMA-68 covers a *huge* range of products. we have a guy in Spain who's designing a hand-held games console. the KDE Team is sponsoring the development of a 7in tablet with a 1024x600 IPS screen (actually the same panel from LG that's in the Kindle Fire). once we've got actual demo products we'll go to netbooks, laptops, LCD TVs and Desktop computers next. my favourite product i'm really looking forward to is a Digital SLR camera. no, really! a camera with decent lenses with a user-replaceable CPU Card, how cool would that be? rather than swap the memory card out, you'd actually swap the *entire processor* :) and upgrade it later to a faster version. or put in a CPU Card with a built-in 3G Modem, so you can upload pictures automatically and in real-time. journalists (professional and amateur) would love that.

so. yeah. all good stuff.

Re:Definitions, please?

[lkcl]

I, for one, would be very happy if my NAS was upgradable like this.

yeah me too! NAS boxes is on the list of products, as well as routers. as an open hardware project where the CPU Card is guaranteed to have full GPL Source Code, you'd be able to do anything - re-use the older cards as a router, and cycle them down over the years, between products. last year's "latest tablet CPU Card" becomes "the kid's games console CPU Card" becomes "the NAS / router" for your home or the "Freedom Box" for your grandma.

Re:Definitions, please?

[lkcl]

All of that is fine, until you can't upgrade the bus, and that becomes the limiting factor. And, when you upgrade the bus, you usually cannot use existing cards (easily). Upgradable items are usually good for two, perhaps three generations before the rest of the device is obsolete. Which may be a fine goal, but if the cost of the device doubles between upgradability and the upgrades themselves, it becomes a wash at two upgrade cycles and only profitable at three. That is a risk, and one I've seen burn people when they are caught buying an upgradable item that has no upgrades made for it.

let me answer the profitability issue first. we chose to re-use legacy housings, sockets and assemblies precisely because to do otherwise *would* result in this becoming a profitable venture only at cycle 3. there's a company in the U.S.+Taiwan which has had $USD 100m investment to create a 100mm x 70mm x 10mm modular PC standard. we've had *zero* investment.... and haven't needed it! the CPU Card development cost us under $10k. the tablet: $6k. getting new plastic done for the card because we're re-using PCMCIA metal casework from a product that's been made for the past 10 years straight: $6k.

so you're thinking inside-the-box, i feel compelled to point out :) we'll go into "profitability" with the first 10k order!! everyone involved has been working on a commission-only basis for the past 4 years on the project. there *are* no investors or banks to pay off. the first lot of profits will go straight back into the project and will begin to fund and reward the free software developers and other people who have been helping us out over the years, and that will happen pretty much immediately.

regarding the upgradeability and the durability of the standard: there's one factor that you've not taken into consideration, and it's the power requirements of faster interfaces. 10GbE over copper takes SIX WATTS, just to push the signals over those 4 twisted-pairs that's just... insane. as people have wanted faster and higher resolution screens, VGA has fallen by the wayside because at 75 ohms impedance, driving 3 lines at 200mhz and above in *analog* is just way waaay too power-hungry.

but look closely at the interfaces selected for EOMA-68. RGB/TTL (24-pin), I2C, USB3, Gigabit Ethernet and SATA. are any of those particularly critical that they be ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra fast? no not really. what are they connected to? well, they're connected to peripherals i.e. I/O. do you really really really really need an 8096x5000 resolution LCD panel on a 7in tablet? no not really. do you need a 10000Mbytes/second SATA hard drive on a 10in $150 laptop? no, not really. do you need 10 Gigabit Ethernet on a portable device where battery life is important? no, you don't.

so you're thinking of upgradeability as being all-important and the be-all and end-all of computing appliances, and i think you'll find that it really, really isn't that critical. at the apple end of the market? sure, there will be people who will always go after apple products, and the great thing is: just like microsoft's absolute-insane-latest-and-greatest processing and memory requirements have pushed the price of RAM down to $4 for 1GByte of 800mhz DDR3 RAM, so will apple's R&D costs *also* drive down the cost of parts for the rest of us who are happy to sell in much higher volume, quietly, to the rest of the world market including China which is 10x the size of the rest of the world's markets PUT TOGETHER and nobody knows it even exists.

summary: the strategy we've pursued immediately pays off, and the EOMA-68 standard's designed around a different market focus which i believe is sound for at least the next decade. we could always develop new standards that take advantage of the latest-and-greatest innovations, but they would be limited to the latest-and-greatest products. we're going after the bigger volumes - the cash cow markets - and helping the Factories to stabilise their products, take advantage of the latest-and-greatest as it filters down.

does that make sense?

Re:Definitions, please?

[lkcl]

http://lkcl.net/articles/tiny.computers.txt

the above article may help also to give you some background about where this came from and where it's going.

Re:Definitions, please?

[AdamHaun]

got a problem with that? then FUCK OFF and stay out of my way. you do your thing, with your thoughts; i'll do mine.

Excuse me? You're the one who keeps bringing your pointless stories about meaningless "progress" on your pie in the sky project to Slashdot. Last time you were asking for ten million dollars for a hopeless SoC project that you yourself knew nothing about. Now you're back here, what, trolling for pre-orders and funding? What kind of con artist are you?

And let's be clear, this isn't even really *your* project. You're throwing money at companies in China to get them to do the work for you, and you can't even answer their questions. You're nothing but a sales guy with a vague idea and a big ego. Come back when you're selling in volume, until then please quit wasting our time.

Re:Definitions, please?

[AdamHaun]

you do your thing, and i'll do mine ok? have some respect for people's desire to keep going and to encourage others to succeed.

I do not complain about other people's personal projects. But when you start asking for money, there's some responsibility that goes along with that. Part of it is being honest with others and yourself about who you are and how you operate. Part of it is responding to criticism. You can't expect the benefit of the doubt when you're selling something, especially when you barely understand your own project. You can't expect us to be trusting when we find out that nobody is working with you except the outside companies you're paying to do the design and prototyping. If your response to criticism of your credentials and your business model is to act persecuted and accuse others of bullying, how are you going to make it in the business world?

You want to make a funky SBC? Great! You had some working boards fabbed? Congrats! I am sincerely happy for you. You want to share the joy of your project with others? Go for it! (Maybe bring some technical people along, though.)

You want other people's money? Come back when you're actually shipping product.

A pipe dream...

[n7ytd]

And every CPU that goes into the products will be pre-vetted for full GPL compliance, with software releases even before the product goes out the door. That's what we've promised to do: to provide Free Software developers with the opportunity to be involved with mass-volume product development every step of the way.

If "full GPL compliance" is a goal of the project, then it's doomed to mediocrity. Real chip vendors are not going to share their secret sauce, either because they can't due to patent/IP agreements or because they don't see a reason to risk handing the crown jewels to their competition. It just ain't gonna happen.

Re:A pipe dream...

[lkcl]

If "full GPL compliance" is a goal of the project, then it's doomed to mediocrity. Real chip vendors are not going to share their secret sauce, either because they can't due to patent/IP agreements or because they don't see a reason to risk handing the crown jewels to their competition. It just ain't gonna happen.

then we will not talk to them. they can fuck right off. we only need one or two companies to cooperate: that's the beauty of it. we don't need *every* chip vendor to cooperate with us, we just need *one* chip vendor to cooperate with us. when the other companies see just how much volume we're shipping through our clients they'll want a slice of the action, and we will remind them that we will NOT expose our distributors to massive liability of primary and secondary Copyright Infringment Lawsuits.

i'm staggered beyond belief that huge companies like Amazon aren't aware of the fact that they're risking being sued to the bedrock with a secondary Copyright Infringment Lawsuit. they should be banning these GPL violating products *outright*! but they're being hoodwinked... and unfortunately for them, in the eyes of the law, that's no excuse.

we *are* aware of the GPL, and the implications of Copyright Infringment, so we simply cannot and will not expose the distributors to that liability - end of story.

basically, your comments fail to recognise that the SoC vendors who "want to keep things secret" are in most cases now operating illegally, due to their criminal infringment of Copyright Law. many of them, like AMLogic, have *already* lost their rights to distribute the Linux Kernel Source code due to their GPLv2 violations of two years ago. for a SoC vendor to do that is COMPLETELY insane!! especially given that AMLogic is now owned by a USA-based company.

but in the cases where these SoC vendors *are* operating within the law yet are keeping things proprietary (through the "System Library" GPL exemption clause), there what we will do is put some funds towards reverse-engineering their hardware. ironic that we will use the money gained from the sale of their own products to do that, but it is, long-term in their own interests.

i don't know if you're aware of this, but in the case of 3D GPUs, the actual 3D GPU vendors *want* the free software community to reverse-engineer their hardware! the reason is this: the sole reason why they cannot publish information about their own GPUs is because of the risk of a patent war. i don't know if you've seen that talk given 6 months ago about this, but the situation between NVidia, ATI and so on, because they are mature products, they've come to an uneasy truce on their various patent portfolios. the so-called "embedded" GPU companies, they're new at this, and they are nervous as hell. *but*, they know the advantages that free software brings! google the story about the Intel GPU team getting together with the Valve/Steam developers: one of them said "it was the most productive work meeting they had EVER had", and it's because *BOTH* teams could read each others' source code... without having to go to their respective Directors and get NDA clearance, which would apart from anything have taken MONTHS.

so there is a lot more going on here than it first seems, ok?

Re:Price?

[lkcl]

not a chance. that mis-printed and mis-read story is annoying. i actually said "the Bill of Materials for a 7in tablet is reported by the SoC vendor to be around $15". by the time you add in all the other components (e.g. 1gb of RAM not 256mb) you actually get to around $30 worth. so the sale price is going to be another 50% on top of that, then you will need to take into account tax, shipping, customs tax, customs tax on shipping, VAT, customs tax on tax on VAT, packaging, power supply etc. etc.

Re:Does Realtek RTD1186 have a FPU

[lkcl]

It would be difficult to be OpenGL compliant without an FPU, as the OpenGL support libraries will have to run on the CPU and need to manipulate floating point numbers. Obviously this can be done, but it would be a little tricky. There are also rumours of a working Android port, which also would be tricky without an FPU.

i've learned from hunting around in one of the firmware packs for an RTD1186 HTDV product that the GPU is a PowerVR SGX 531.