SMedia 3362

Shawn Rutledge shawn.t.rutledge at gmail.com
Sun Sep 2 00:14:25 CEST 2007


On 9/1/07, Marcin Juszkiewicz <openembedded at hrw.one.pl> wrote:
> Dnia sobota, 1 września 2007, Shawn Rutledge napisał:
>
> > What about the XScale accelerators? There was one designed
> > specifically as a companion to the PXA270. Are they more open?
>
> Intel 2700G? It is closed - the only source released was mess afaik.

Apparently it's also discontinued.  That's too bad.

I see that a Spartan 3L (low-power version) would take several times
as much power as the 2700G.  The million gate one (to cut it down a
bit, in comparison to which the OpenGraphics project is using the 4
million gate version) has quiescent current ratings of 35 mA for
internal supply plus 20 mA for AUX supply.  So if I understand
correctly that is the minimum, if it's turned on at all.  I suppose if
you are actively doing something, it would be several times as much.
The OpenGraphics board has a heatsink, after all.

http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=OGD1

That's a bummer.  I think programmable hardware would be an excellent
way for open software to innovate right around the barriers of
proprietary graphics chips.  But I don't have any experience at all
programming them yet.

There is the NVIDIA GoForce 4800 and I don't see datasheets for it either.

> SL-6000? Too bad that it was so pricey - community lack hackers which want
> to get software support on them improved (OpenEmbedded project can even
> provide one or two SL-6000 for such tasks).

I'm still working with mine.  Angstrom is working well enough to do
the kind of hacking I want to do.  I'm glad the 2.6 kernel is finally
OK.

On 9/1/07, Ian Stirling <OpenMoko at mauve.plus.com> wrote:
> FPGAs of equivalent size are _NOT_ cheap, or low power.
> I'd guess the SMedia chip is $20 or so.
> Now, go and look for a low power FPGA with the thick end of a megabyte
> of embedded RAM, and many thousand gates. It'll be at least $100, maybe
> $200.

That's how it used to be.  A million-gate Spartan IIIE ranges from
about $20 down to $7.90 at Digikey depending on the number of IO pins
(I think you can easily get under $5 in volume).  Power would be the
problem with those chips.  I wonder who's the low-power leader for
FPGAs.


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