Another nice looking ARM board
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Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
Possible candidate for porting? I wonder how good the documentation for the SoC? 2Gb RAM, SATA, Gigabit, quad A9s at 1GHz, and under 100 quid. http://www.buydvb.net/mini-pc-c-26/matrix-arm-mini-pc-p-97.html |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
UK pricing: (£129) So over 100 Technical: I presume you found it through one of the DVB related articles as it seems to be intended for use with USB connected TV tuners. http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/document/tbs2910/TBS2910-Matrix-ARM-mini-PC-SCH_rev1.0.pdf What were you thinking? Chip in and buy one for Jeffrey to distract him from other work? Or having a go at a HAL yourself? Just looked at the schematic info for the DDR3 memory – 2GB |
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Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
Possibly the site I linked to (£94.54) didn’t include VAT?
That’s good. So upgrading the firmware could be as easy as Pi.
I wasn’t thinking of anything specific. I recall our discussions on how to handle multicore processors, I recall that some people have asked for a board with SATA, and here’s one with oooooodles of memory. |
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Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/data_sheet/IMX6DQCEC.pdf |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
It’s a good job you’re in France, closer and I might make an exception to my non-violence policy of 40+ years
clock speeds listed seem to be: setting 0 is less than the quoted 1GHz in the glossy bits
Possibly less likely to have the storage naff up – spinny rust vs. exploding memory. Of course it has SD in there as well. PS. Big bonus, there’s a version of Ubuntu available ;) (Missile from France incoming?) |
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Jeffrey Lee (213) 6048 posts |
It should feel a fair bit faster than a BB-xM, even running on just one core. Clock-for-clock Cortex-A9 outperforms Cortex-A8 by quite a bit (30%? 50%?) thanks to improvements like support for out-of-order execution. clock speeds listed seem to be: I’m not sure where you got those figures from, but the datasheet Rick links to shows that the specific SoC they’re using is capable of 1GHz (there are also other versions capable of 800MHz and 1.2GHz) |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
page 13 of the schematic. That was the third link I posted. Even so the specification seems quite nice. What is needed is a HAL Howto that doesn’t involve much equipment then various people can play with their preferred toy and see how far they get. |
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Jeffrey Lee (213) 6048 posts |
Like this? https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/How%20to%20port%20RISC%20OS%20to%20new%20hardware |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
Maybe a bit more fleshing out? I was thinking of something that halfway led people by the nose, then maybe you could sit back and supervise several efforts. PS. I notice from a comment in one of the news articles the GigE port is limited to 480Mb/s by the internal bus. How would we cope with such limitations? :) |
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Jeffrey Lee (213) 6048 posts |
To be honest if someone reading that guide finds it insufficient then they’re probably not the right person for the job! When creating a hardware port you’ll need to build up a lot of domain-specific knowledge (RISC OS internals, ARM architecture, target platform, etc.). There’s simply too much to teach in a simple how-to guide, you need to be someone who’s capable of researching and working things out on your own. You also need to be capable of debugging crashes on your own – you won’t be any good to anyone if you come crying to the forums for help every five minutes, especially if you’re the only person with access to your source code and the hardware to run it on. Also don’t forget that creating a hardware port requires a lot of dedication. An initial port might take only a few weeks, but to finish it could easily take a year or more. E.g. it’s now 5 years since I started work on the OMAP3 port, and yet I’m still working on major features for it. With the limited developer manpower that we have available, we want people who’ll stick with projects until the end, not get bored halfway through and wander off and do something else. |
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Steffen Huber (91) 1953 posts |
Whatever happened to Michael Grunditz? He started an i.MX5 port for the Efika MX devices. |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
In my case, spot on. I did read it as a skim and I’ve corrected a typo in the last of the early bullet points. |
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patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
I’m sure this has been mentioned but wouldn’t it be better to invest this amount of work in an A-15 port? Thinking of TI’s OMAP6432 EVM @ USD 329
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Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
@ patric – spec looks good, it also does SATA (don’t think you listed that). However, at $329 it may be out of reach for a number of people? I could consider saving up to buy one of the Matrix thingies. Given the usual $→£ rate, I simply could not justify paying that much for an ARM board when my eeePC is ages old and needs to be replaced. For that kind of money I could get a lower-end desktop PC which, really, I’ll need soon. The only reason I have not gone for one sooner is I played with the demo of Windows 8 in a local supermarket and hated it. I might try to pick up a second hand box that dates from this decade (!) and put Ubuntu on it. [any offers? ;-)] The processor is a dual core. I wonder if a well designed multitasker would get better performance from a fast dual core (it doesn’t appear to say what speed this clocks at) or from a slower quad core? Might be worth reading the comments on the cnx page. :-( |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
Available from which UK source? and price? It had a rather quiet release almost as though they had lost interest in the eval boards but already had that in the pipeline. |
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Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
Hasn’t TI sort of jacked in the OMAP? It looks like they have abandoned the mobile/tablet sector to concentrate on embedded. I don’t imagine that standard embedded devices need anything like the multimedia capabilities of the OMAP. http://www.zdnet.com/how-tis-move-out-of-smartphones-into-servers-highlights-chip-issues-7000007439/ |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
Yes, I think the EVM the Patric noted (5432 rather than 6432 I think) was in the pipeline when they made the announcement. The Freescale in this instance looks like an item they’ve made for their multi-media use so may have a longer availability. |
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patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
That’s true, TI seems to have dropped out in favour of the embedded market which currently leaves the Arndale board as the only A-15 alternative. Unfortunately Samsung aren’t very forecoming with documentation for their Exynos line.
I think there are still two ex WinXP boxes I need to get rid off. Not sure about specs, I put Ubuntu 10.10 on one and Puppy on the other but they’re fairly old, more like 2006 or so I’d guess. |
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Chris Gransden (337) 1207 posts |
There is an alternative A-15 board, or at least there will be once it’s released. It’s the IGEPv5 OMAP5432. Available in europe so should be easier to get hold of and hopefully cheaper. I think pricing is supposed to be announced some time in January. It’s very similar to the TI EVM board but has a higher spec. 2GHz cpu and 4GBytes of ram. |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 8172 posts |
The use of the OMAP may be a bit of a stumbling block – if TI have killed the embedded development (and their press releases say as much) the core processor could be in short supply |
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Chris Gransden (337) 1207 posts |
The way I saw it was they can no longer compete with Qualcomm, NVIDIA and Samsung in the mobile processor business so are focusing on other markets. |
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Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
…but there have been “rumours” of shortages of parts. Perhaps the best bet at the moment is the OMAP4 (one, 4430?, is used in the Kindle Fire).
Indeed. It is sad to see TI pull out on this fact alone. The Pi’s documentation is embarrassing in comparison.
…and where did the Pi fit into this? I’d say it makes sense for the next port to be to something that people are likely to want to buy – perhaps when they need a little more oomph than the Pi can offer, but not at a price that is hard to justify. Of course, a lot of this also depends upon the quality of the documentation… I just wish they would have coupled a good ARM processor to a useful GPU; underwhelming display capabilities seems to be something of a trend… http://xkcd.com/768/ |
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Chris Gransden (337) 1207 posts |
Doesn’t this just apply to the mobile phone industry where orders for processors are measured in the tens of millions. Dev boards are usually produced in the tens of thousands.
The RPi sits at the low end entry level starting at £28. Next up from this is the Pandaboard ES starting at £145 which caters for the medium end. What’s missing is a high end machine. This is where the TI EVM/IGEPv5 comes in. Starting at around the £250 mark. Higher processor speeds, more memory and much higher memory bandwidth. Also the potential of using USB3, SATA 2.0, eMCC and Gigabit Ethernet. |
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Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
True. However if a part sees popular use, it is more likely to be in regular fab; because I don’t imagine TI would gear up a process to run off just a few thousand, when something else can be made in the millions.
How about a medium range solution with SATA support for proper spinning rust?
Where did you get that price? The isee site describes the options of the IGEPv5 with a lot of “up to” but it isn’t part of their active sales yet. It offers USB3 and an A15 at “up to” 2GHz, but there are too many variables to make a direct comparison. That said – if RISC OS was available for the Matrix board, I would be interested. It looks like it offers quite a lot for the price. |
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Colin (478) 2433 posts |
I’d like one. I like the way you can just plug in a msata ssd underneath it – very neat. The box with the screen shown here is what I’d like. |
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