Another nice looking ARM board

Where did you get that price?

I meant the TI EVM board not Arndale.

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

The way I read the TI press release and the further clarifications was not that TI will kill embedded development. TI just said that they will no longer compete in the mobile phone/tablet area, mainly because they don’t have the necessary capacities to keep up development of next generation mobile wireless technology. So they concentrate on the embedded use areas where they don’t need LTE and successors. Like automotive. Industrial control. It remains to be seen if these target markets demand the types of SoCs that are good to run RISC OS.

Anyway, for the forseeable future OMAP5 remains our best bet to run RISC OS on a Cortex-A15 platform. Other manufacturers are not exactly known to provide the necessary information for a RISC OS port – and that includes Qualcomm, Broadcom, Freescale, NVidia, Samsung and Rockchip.

Like automotive. Industrial control. It remains to be seen if these target markets demand the types of SoCs that are good to run RISC OS.

Therein lies a problem. Automotive – unlikely to need display capabilities. If their industrial control is anything like the NS5s we use at work, it looks like a dumb framebuffer at 640×480 for a build-in LCD (and seriously low-res resistive touch controls overlaid so you can use them with fingers covered in “gunk”). The main I/O appears to be a lowish speed serial port that talks to a PLC that talks to another PLC and eventually stuff actually happens. I have a “dead” NS5 (power up, it just goes beeeeeeeeeeee…). Taking it apart, it looks like a large SoC. Can’t find any details, but looking at its boot phase and how it behaves on the machines at work, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t just a 486 with some memory and I/O on-board. The latency in switching ‘screens’ (a sort of Windows-lite UI) is noticeable. I would imagine these things are designed to be bulletproof, not fast.

Other manufacturers are not exactly known to provide the necessary information for a RISC OS port

Tell me about it. Just when TI finally got the message about the importance of datasheets to the developer community…

…maybe when ARM matures enough to support a common discovery protocol, we might see datasheets become more prevalent. Until then… sometimes it seems to me that chip bakers make their SoCs different just because they can.

The IGEPv5 OMAP5432 board is now shipping. See here. It works out at around £250 for the lite version (1GB memory, no wireless or eMMC) or £300 for the 4GB version.
Volunteers for a RISC OS port would be much appreciated. :-)

The IGEPv5 OMAP5432 board is now shipping

Looking good, I want one ;)
BTW what happened to the IGEPv2 users, haven’t heard anything from them on here for a long time

I vote for it ;-) The new “Pandora” the Pyra (comming soon) have a OMAP5.

Tempting! Shame I have at least a year’s worth of work on other areas to get finished first.

I wonder how much merit there would be in creating a version of the OS that supports 64bit physical addresses (i.e. aiming for the 4GB version). It could be a useful step towards an ARMv8 port (whether running in 32bit or 64bit mode), but I don’t think there’s much else we’d gain from it considering how little RAM most RISC OS software uses.

Tempting! Shame I have at least a year’s worth of work on other areas to get finished first.

Only a years worth, clearly you need a bigger workload :)

… but I don’t think there’s much else we’d gain from it considering how little RAM most RISC OS software uses.

I sometimes wonder how many big RAM applications don’t get done because there isn’t enough.
Then again I suppose there should be a flood starting already what with 512MB being a 30 quid purchase these days.

Only a years worth, clearly you need a bigger workload :)

I said “at least”, not “only” :)

https://www.isee.biz/store/product/97-igepv5-omap5432-ce

A cheaper version, more in line with the price of the original IGEPv2.

I haven’t booted my IGEPv2 for some time, and I have a rev-C that I never got to boot, though it was mainly because the bootloader is so fussy about stuff, I think. Should be doable, but I ran out of time. The Pi offers me most of what the IGEPv2 did, but for a much nicer price tag! The only thing I miss is the not-via-USB LAN of IGEPv2, which seemed to be blisteringly fast to me with Stephen Leary’s driver. However, I didn’t do any quantitative testing on that, so it could just have been imagination/wishful thinking!

You beat me to it ;-)
149€ does sound interesting indeed. Panda killer?

Anyone interested in starting a port, give me a shout, I’ll sponsor the hardware.

I think we need to tell Jeffrey what he is going to do rather than letting him choose what he wants to do :-)

You lot basically tell me what to do anyway :P

You lot basically tell me what to do anyway :P

You should be more forceful – just tell them whether to buy you an OMAP5 board or a Chromebook.

Now should that be :) or not?

That is indeed a very nice board, and I would think meets most of the requirements for a ‘next gen’ board – price, SATA, dual core (not that we’re anywhere near that particular challenge yet on the Panda!) OMAP4→OMAP5 and a decent number of ports to boot (no more USB hub requirements).

3 video outputs would definitely be enough to test the proposed multi-display APIs too :-D.

Jeffrey – do you have any ‘friends’ with a cloning device of some sort?