[Arm-netbook] SATA and IDE memory-addressable ICs

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 4:48 AM, Baybal Ni <nikulinpi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that S5C* series SoCs totally doesn't suite a notebook.

 it's not _promoted_ as being suited for notebooks - in fact it's not
really promoted at all.  it's surprisingly quiet, yet is just as
feature-rich as, and is comparable to, the freescale iMX515.  in fact
they're pretty much the same bar minor details, the iMX51* and S5C*

 and we know that the iMX51 is used in the pegatron netbook reference
design, which was made _well_ over a year ago [and no retailer has
touched it - but that's another story]


> First, how many USB ports does they feature and what is their throughput?

 high-speed USB2, 480mb/sec, quantity 2 (one is USB-OTG, the other is
plain USB2-HOST).

> What would be the price for adding additional HCs or onboard hubs?

 genesys logic GL850G x2 or other small 7-port hub: under $2.  peanuts
in other words.

> Does they feature integrated laptop size display driver?

 yep.  two, i believe.  and it has integrated OpenGL ES 2.0 3D
acceleration.  and HDMI out.  you should see the odroid developer
platform videos - http://hardkernel.com http://dev.odroid.com

> S5C* series
> feels more like a cellphone solution, than something that is ok for
> notebook.

 it's complete overkill for a cellphone i.e. it would have to be a
_really_ high-end cellphone / smartphone.  thus it is effectively
piggy-in-the-middle: too complex and costly to be a viable "low-end"
cellphone, and not quiiite "proven" to be a laptop CPU, it's made its
way into things like those video set-top box recorders etc.

> I suggest your team to look forward to alternative, more
> price efficient SoC like Marvell's 88AP510. It has 2 onboard PSIX,
> onboard pmu, nand controller, sdio, usb 2.0 phy, onboard sata. But it
> have its own disadvantages too like not being a more complete SoC,
> requiring external power driver and no built in wireless and audio.
> Still, it can lead to a much more simple and cheaper solution: SoC +
> BT+WIFI 2in1 on SDIO + 4200 rpm harddrive + cheapest audio codec +
> power driver.

 it sounds great... but can you get information about its pricing, and
the datasheets publicly, WITHOUT an NDA?

 marvell are complete fuckers: they _will_ not release information.  i
do not want to encourage any manufacturer to continue these kinds of
practices: i am fed up of the amount of time that free software
developers spend doing reverse-engineering and end up with
half-working hardware.   so - no.  fuckem.  they can make whatever
nice ICs they want, i'm _not_ recommending them until they quit with
the NDA shit.  i've had enough.

 but - yeah, i could be wrong in this case.  if you can tell me what
the pricing is, in samples, 1k volumes and 10k volumes, and point me
at a publicly-downloadable datasheet, i'll add it to the list.  it
looks like support for it has made it into the linux kernel source
2.6.32, so there's hope.

 l.