[Arm-netbook] 9nov11: progress on allwinner A10

[Bari Ari]

On 11/09/2011 02:44 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> ok, just a quick thoughts / status update.
>
> we've had it confirmed that the CPU is external 2gb addressing but
> *internal* limited to 1gb (!)
>
> little factory is still going over the BOM, but want to put in 512mb
> DDR RAM ICs because they're cheaper.

Having 1GB as at least an option would be nice. Too many other ARM 
devices are crippled with only 128MB or 256 MB of RAM.
>
> then we put two and two together and went, "hang on, these are
> effectively blades, why not have a chassis like the ZT-Systems one,
> with a gigabit backbone,
What interface on the A10 would this gigabit backbone be attached?
> so _then_ i thought, hang on, NAND flash ICs in SSDs are like,
> dropping like a stone as they pick up the slack from the fact that
> low-end SATA and IDE drives don't exist, hmm, and the spec on the
> allwinner CPU says that it has 8 NAND chip-select lines... why not ask
> the little factory in shenzen if they can make room (on the other side
> of the PCMCIA card) for another 7 4gb NAND flash ICs?
Why not just use SD flash? Something embedded would only need SD and 
RAM. Tablets use an onboard flash drive since they experience being 
dropped and are handled roughly. A blade rarely experiences this 
physical activity. Servers or a desktop would use a SATA drive.

BTW, will these boards use u-boot or some proprietary firmware for init 
and bootloader?

-Bari