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Intel's StrongArm Roadmap
Midvale writes
"PC Week article about the plans Intel has for the next
set of StrongArm chips, .18 micron process, up to 600mHz. These things would be great CPU's for wearable computers."
Its nice to see that this isn't gonna die out.
of course one is powerful enough, for god sakes thats what the EMPEG uses.. .. decoding mp3's takes _very_ little cpu usage if you have a good OS such as linux.
Some friends and i have been looking at building
mp3 car units for some time now, strongarm setups
would be perfect, BUT we've had _no_ luck finding
resellers in the US.
Check
www.empeg.com
And to think, the 1st handheld to use the ARM, the Newton, is no more.
Perhaps the GNU/Linux project at:
http://www.calcaria.net/
will actually become more than a proof of concept.
All I have to say is, show me a real palmtop that boots Linux and I'll write a UI for it. Seriously.
That's a pretty interesting idea, but that'll take some power.
But if MP3's are the future of music (or some other digital format), the standard shouldn't be 44khz, 16bit, stereo, 128 kbps. I think they'll come up with at better format for quality digital music encoding, but for now I think the standard for true digital music recoring for mp3 should be greater, for example: raise the bitrate to 256kbps (see the bladeenc page to find out why, sorry, I forgot the address).
3Com Palm.
*duck*
The Palm Pilot isn't a real palmtop?
--
Erik Corry without his cookies
You said: '...Acorn Computers (the "A" in ARM)...'
Eh? What _are_ you smoking? From http://www.arm.com/FAQ/index.html : "We are ARM Ltd., previously named 'Advanced RISC Machines'..."
Try here.
Hugo Fiennes has built a car mp3 player using the ARM7100, which is a fraction of the power of a StrongARM. He runs it on Linux, which he ported (to the same processor as the Psion5!). Read more details at http://mp3.com/news/042.html
The StrongARM is easily powerful enough for this application, despite not having FP. You need to optimise the popular source for integer arithmetic if you want to hammer the CPU for doing other things.
Big whoop.
If its a wonderful technology, Intel will licence it.
an earlier version of the ARM chip used to be able to parallel process, so i'm pretty sure these will be able to. You used to be able to do it with Acorn Risc PC's a couple of years ago....
It was Acorn ltd.
:-).
:-)
They were searching for a new CPU for their next homecomputers and all what they found was too lame for them (eg. 68000, x86). So they built the "Acorn Risc Machine", the prototype ARM1 was finished around 1985 (IIRC). I still have one of those "Acorn Risc Machines", an 8 MHz ARM2 wich "powers" my old Acorn A3000
IMHO that's the reason of ARM's success: Since Acorn always was a very small company, they had to make the ARM simple. That's why ARM cores are so tiny and not so dammned bloated like Intel ones.
Acorn founded later (early 1990s) together with Apple and VLSI "Advanced Risc Machines", wich is ARM ltd. now.
Oh, BTW: Acorn was the company that sold the first
RISC personal computers - the now legendary Archimedes (1987) - and not Apple!
(This article is Y2K-ready!
Of course it runs NetBSD! - the coolest OS on this planet!
the StrongARM is based on the ARM4 core, and explicitly has the connections for SMP cut. (I don't know if the ARM4 core was ever really good for SMP anyway.)
I remember some group working on a kludged shared-memory map for StrongARM, but they killed it after a while, b/c it was a kludge, and it showed.
The ARM10 core is supposed to kick-all-ass in SMP, but unfortuneately no one has announced plans to put it in silicon.
ARM Ltd. designs the cores of ARM cpus. A core is not a completed CPU, and thus ARM licenses core designs to, well, a whole hell of a lot of different vendors. Like Digital. (Btw, the reason the StrongARM was so cool was that Digital achieved cpu performance 4-10 times that of other ARM licensees. Just a footnote.)
Yes, the ARM10 core rocks the free world.
No, the ARM10 core will not be in your hands this year. ARM has announced it, it's probably done by now, but no vendor has announced it in silicon yet. REPEAT. No vendor has announced ARM10 cpus yet.
Funny, but the people at Calcaria call their project "Linux 7k".
No "GNU" in sight.
Who are you to rename it?
Fricking GNU Nazis.
I'm thinking of something with as nice a keyboard as possible and as low power consumption as possible. A built in modem and ethernet, no floppy or CD, net boot eprom for OS installs and a battery that lasts for ever.
The screen options could include 640x480 black and white which should be fine for vi/mutt/tin/lynx or emacs and save a lot of batteries (and RAM, which saves batteries) or 1024x768 for the X addicts. I don't think the intermediate resolutions are interesting to Linux users. A tuned kernel that does delayed atime updates and doesn't swap unless it has to to keep the hard disk spun down would complete the picture.
Has anyone tried putting their .newsrc and mail folders under CVS to keep them synchronised between a laptop and a stationary?
Erik Corry without his cookies
So far as powerful enough is concerned, expect
the new SA's to actually have FP units (or at
least some of them).
Quoting from www.arm.com
"The ARM10T processor is designed to deliver 400
Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS at 300 MHz, and features an
optional Vector Floating-Point unit capable of
delivering 600 MFLOPS."
As for SMP, that would still be useful, but consider dedicating one SA to the decoding (which
it should be able to do) and another to the rest
of the system (have them running async with respect to one another)
IIRC they have no SMP ability, could still do a beowulf style thing tho.
They are nice chips in general.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Given ARM's repuation for low power chips... The cooling fan in the Netwinder is there for the sake of the HD, and if I am not mistaken, the support chipset puts out more heat than the chip itself -- and thats at 275Mhz
John_Chalisque
Why would you want to do that? The only reason why Linux should be ported to a handheld is that Linux should get more prestige, as the operating system that runs on more hardware platforms than any other.
Linux (and other unices) are built for computers with disk drives and a keyboard. Most handhelds don't have neither or the hardware support is poor.
Another problem is the lack of virtual memory. If there is none, the usual way of letting applications have control of a large memory area of their own is not efficient.
If anyone is working on an open source operating system for handhelds (that isn't cLinux), mail me. I am interested.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
They seem to have forgotten Linux on the list of OSes that support the StrongARM processor (Corel Netwinder). It's nice to see that there will most likely be a new generation of faster netwinder machines.
I have heard that these machines have amazing SMP capabilities. Anyone know anything about this?
It's got some unusual properties -- relatively high tolerance for hard radiation for one. I read the following use in an AMSAT journal a few months back.
:) has been using the same ancient 8bit microcontroller on their satellites for some time now, as most ucontrollers are not suitable to the radiation levels in space. But these days .5 MIPS just doesn't cut it, so they went around looking for a better chip -- and found StrongARM. Their next satellite will have a 133MHz ARM, plenty of CPU power to go around.
:)
It turns out AMSAT (the lunatics who build themselves satellites out of parts they find at KMART
I wonder if they'll run Linux
Yeah, I used to tease my brother when he'd say "millihertz" (meaning megahertz, of course). Now, I'm going to his college graduation this weekend. Hopefully he learned something. ;-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I would hate to drive near any of you guys. Mixing MP3s in your car? How about a simple Mp3 player that fist in the space my stereo fits now. Grab the dinky little chip out of the Rio and plug it in. I'd just like to be able to take my MP3s on the road with me, before you stick a Beowulf cluster in my trunk, make me a removeable storage media that costs about as much as a blank CD, is rewriteable, and is about the size of a CompactFlash card. The problem with portable MP3 players isnt the processor, it's the storage, 100+ dollars for a 48Mb CompactFlash card. I'll build the in-dash MP3 player if you get me a cheap removeable media.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Well, I have a Netwinder (~280 MHz) and it can
play back MP3s using about 10% CPU under Linux.
........ "The faster I go, the behinder I get" - Lewis Carroll
Ummmm, the OS plays but a small part in how much CPU overhead is involved in decoding MP3s. It is far more important to have an efficient program than an efficient OS. There will be a point where the OS vs App graphs cross but I doubt that they have yet.
........ "The faster I go, the behinder I get" - Lewis Carroll
Ok yes digtital did some work with ARM and their CPU but acording to the guys who live upstairs where I worked
(ARM)
they took most of the desighn and then improved it so they could make more money and left digital to their own devices, Digital wail on about itsy but have a look at what
EPOC has done and will do very clever little OS
their are people wandering around with the suits I surpose I dont work their anymore always the way tho
there was mutter about controlers for HD anyone ?
have fun
ARM Ltd (the firm who originally thought of the whole ARM idea and co-developed the StrongARM with DEC) are planning to release the ARM10 core sometime this year. Complete with a FPU. Check out
http://www.arm.com/Pro+Peripherals/Cores/ARM10/
for more details. IMHO it looks better than the planned StrongARMs.
Given Intel's infamous chip-temperature record, I'm not sure I'd want a 600MHz chip in anything that's going to be on my lap...
I read something a week or two ago that said there would be a version of BeOS running on StrongARM procs. Cool stuff!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
I guess it finishes 0.6 clock cycles per second!
;)
Wow! Synchronicity.
I have already been researching this area. I have currently got a 1024 node Z80 beowulf cluster walking on stilts behind my car, and its present performance is satisfactory for Bangles tunes such as "Eternal Flame".
The motion control program is written in an experimental Perl interpreter ( I call it Pyyrrrl) running in Jpython, which runs in a partially functional JVM I found somewhere.
I would appreciate it if people could test out the clusters scaling by going to http://monkey.conspiracy.nu/
The way I have mine configured is to encode direct from a ZX Spectrum tapedrive , and decode on the fly. This is done to ensure the maximum hiss.
Boldy noise reduction circuitry is then utilised to remove this hiss, and provide an 11.1 channel multi aural ( and oral) surround experience.
The subwoofer is currently made of ivory, so this has some issues and may be replaced with other hard tissue. The good thing is that it can be driven by anyone with an HGV licence!
This may go into production sometime in the future. Watch for more news!
I thank you muchly.
These giraffe necks will mesh far more pleasantly than the substances I am currently using, and the occasional whiplash should create a good original beat in the rythym.
I propose that you be given the Nobel prize for music immediately.
I am thinking of creating an MP3 player for my car, based round a handheld.
I am currently working on a parrallel MP3 coder/decoder, and have had some success on my small 4 node Beowulf Cluster.
I dont think that a single StrongARM would be powerful enough, so does anyone know if they will support parrallel processes, and if they will work in parrallel - I have not had the time to do more research on this chip.
Thanks
ARM originally stood for Acorn Risc Machine - it was designed by Acorn. The acronym was changed to mean Advanced Risc Machines when it was spun off as a separate company with Apple and VLSI technology.
..if it too will heat my basement, fry eggs, keep my coffee hot, and make the lights dim every time I start up a process (netscape comes to mind) :-P