Hardware

[Glenn Alexander]

On Monday 07 April 2003 07:09, Tom Novelli wrote: 
> That's a nice idea you've got there, Glenn.  You could get a mini-ITX board 
> for $100 and slap in a 128MB USB flash stick, but someone has to come up 
> with a new PC standard that doesn't have 25 years of baggage.   
 
Legacy stuff drives me nuts! It eats power and transisters and puts the board 
complexity beyond what I can handle. 
 
>  I think it could deal with flash memory. 
 
It makes the system a lot easier to get blindingly fast if the RAM space can be kept 
small (and hence - one day - on the CPU die). 
 
It looks like I will be using an ARM/Alchemy Au1000 as it has the best feature mix. 
The Au1100 has onboard video, but it isn't arranged the way I want in several ways. 
Between the Alchemy Team's engineering expertese and ARM's financial resources 
and brand acceptance, this chip family seems like a reasonable bet (for now, the 
great thing about a system like Tunes is that the architecture becomes a comodity 
and I can't be locked in if something better comes out.). 
 
First step (and the hardest) is to try to make a video subsystem that I can respect by 
putting a state-machine on the back end of a SGRAM. It will (hopefully) just look like 
plain old memory to the CPU and I can prototype on a SIMM card and test it in an old 
system with a spare slot. 
 
Has the advantage of a VERY fast bus to video (especially if DDR arrives for the Au 
processors, not an unsafe bet since AMD bought them out) and no bus-contention. 
Since I am only  interested in supporting one (pre-defined) screen size/depth per 
device, no setup is needed at all. The memory is just there and the video goes when 
the clock is applied. That's the theory anyway. 
 
I just have to decide whether to learn to program FPGAs or to impliment it in discrete 
logic (the state machine design is THAT simple). I'll be block diagraming and hunting 
parts for several weeks now. 
 
Thanx for continued feedback. 
Glenn Alexander