[Arm-netbook] Low Cost Dev Boards

[lkcl luke]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Bari Ari <bari at onelabs.com> wrote:
> On 01/17/2012 10:53 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>> I stumbled upon this recently:
>>
>> http://www.linaro.org/low-cost-development-boards/
>>
>> I already knew about the Pandaboard, Beagleboard and Freescale's
>> IMX53QSB, buut the other two I hadn't heard of and the spec looks quite
>> good (dual core A9, 1GB of RAM). The price isn't too bad, either, and
>> the format looks easy to put into a 1U rackmount case.
>>
>>
> I'll happily spin a board for any ARM SOC vendor that cooperates.
>
> Nova™ A9500
> http://www.stericsson.com/products/a9500-nova.jsp

 i looked at this one (ok, the U8500).  contacted a guy called richard
at silica.com, and he very kindly spoke to st on my behalf.  the
response was "yes sure we will _consider_ working with you, right now
we're busy supporting our limited client-base who are doing mobile
phones, we'll look at considering contemplating working with you in
feb 2011" which was right when the a9500 was released.

 in other words, bugger off, because of course when the next SoC comes
out (the a9500) we'll suddenly be deluged with support requests from
large corporations who could potentially order tens of millions of
units, our profit margins are so slim that despite that we still don't
make enough money to pay some software engineers, we don't understand
the strategic benefit of selling our CPUs in smaller volumes at higher
markups to make more money, and it's got a baseband on it which we
don't want to have to waste our precious time explaining or even
fielding and stone-walling support calls on, so bugger off, basically.

 :)

in other words, it's a mobile phone processor, it's going to stay that
way, it's a vertically-targetted CPU so why the hell would you want to
use it for anything else (even though we know it would be extremely
good at the job).

*sigh*.

> Exynos 4210
> http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/productInfo.do?fmly_id=844&partnum=Exynos%204210
>
> Samsung started pulling/keeping data sheets off the website to ARM soc's
> after the ARM-11 devices. Not sure how cooperative they are now with the
> GPL and where their pricing is since they also make tablets and
> smartphones with the same parts.

 http://rhombus-tech.net/evaluated_cpus/ search for "samsung".

 samsung don't talk to anyone who cannot prove that they will do a
minimum order of at least 50k units.  they don't talk to *any* chinese
factories.

 l.