ancient hardware?

Ajit Natarajan ajitk at email.com
Mon Jul 7 05:02:23 CEST 2008


Hello,

I've seen a number of remarks on this list that the hardware in the FR 
is ancient and this is the price of openness and freedom.

I did a quick search for some of the parts:

The Samsung 2442 SoC seems to date back to 2005.  I got this from the 
revision history in the user manual [1].

The Antaris 4 GPS chip dates back to 2006.  This is the from the 0635 
datasheet revision history [2].

The Calypso GSM chip dates back to 2000.  This is from the leaked 
hardware definition manual revision history [3].

The Accton 3236 WiFi chip dates back to 2006.  This is from the 
``2006.12'' at the end of the datasheet [4].

I haven't looked at the other chips.

 From the above, the GSM chip looks ancient.  However, the other chips 
don't seem that old.  And some recent devices are using these parts as 
well.  For example, the RoverPC C6 introduced in December 2007 uses the 
Samsung 2442B at 300MHz.

So, I don't understand the comments on ancient parts.  What have we 
compromised on by choosing these parts?

Thanks.

Ajit


[1] 
http://210.118.57.197/Products/Semiconductor/MobileSoC/ApplicationProcessor/ARM9Series/SC32442/um_s3c2442b_rev12.pdf
[2] 
http://www.u-blox.com/products/Data_Sheets/ATR0630_35_SglChip_Data_Sheet(GPS.G4-X-06009).pdf
[3] http://cryptome.org/ti-calypso2.pdf
[4] http://www.accton.com/products/Datasheet/WM3236A.AQ.pdf




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