[Arm-netbook] Selecting the right Soc for out ARM Notebook project.

[krasi gichev]

Why don't you check out some other SoCs from this market? Like
Rockchip RK3066 - it is dual core A9, higher clock, and better GPU. At
the end, A10 is single core, 1GHz - as you say 13" display, this
probably will be 1366 x 768 resolution. It will put a lot of load on
the GPU too. Multicore (4x) in RK30xx will be better suited to this
task. As far as I remember, it must be around $15 USD.

About availability - I think that "for mass production" you can get
any chip you like. But it will be hard to obtain some chips if you
want to take 10 or 50 pcs only.

Going up in the price range, you can check the OMAPs from TI -
OMAP4430/4460 are pretty powerful chips, perfect open source support,
used in several consumer products already using it (Archos, Kindle,
PandaBoard, etc.). Good think about it is that it comes in
Package-on-package variant where DRAM is "glued" on top of the CPU and
you get them both in one package. Older OMAP3530 also had PoP variant,
and it was even designed with greater pitch between balls of the
package so it was easy to make pcb with it. But this new one are
targeted as ultra mobile devices and the goal of TI was to make the
chip as tiny as possible.

Samsung and TI doesn't have Ethernet MAC inside. But it is in the
range of 1-2 USD to get RTL8150 for example - it is USB Ethernet chip,
and it contains a PHY inside. For Allwinner (and all other that have
inbuilt MAC) you still have to add external PHY. Of course, you can
expect better performance from inbuilt Ethernet, but for this type of
CPU it does not matter too much. Also, in case of netbook, you will
almost surely want to include USB hub too - the Allwinner has 1 USB
host and 1 OTG controller, so totally you get maximum of 2 USB hosts.
If you place WiFi module over USB (like all current tablets with this
chip), you end up with only one USB HOST port... If you decide to
include USB HUB chip, that you can get a combo - USB HUB + USB
Ethernet (SMSC has some).

Freescale iMX53 is highly integrated too - it has Ethernet. But it is
still not well supported for Android ICS, and the chip itself is
limited to 1GHz (and is single core). GPU is probably not so powerful
too, but it supports dual output very well. Linux (Ubuntu) runs very
fine with this chip too.
Newer iMX6 are tempting but too early to know much about them. I know
that they offer pin-compatilble single, dual and quad core variants. I
think I read somewhere that GPU was Vivante like in older Rockchips.

2012/5/4 lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com>:
> michel, apologies: i am currently travelling so did not have access to
> the "approve" button on the mailing list, i'm forwarding this on your
> behalf, please could people cc to michel in replies temporarily?
>
> michel, i would be very _very_ interested to speak with you if you
> would like to do an EOMA-68 laptop.
>
> l.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Michel Memeteau - Société Ekimia" <contact at ekimia.fr>
> To: arm-netbook at lists.phcomp.co.uk
> Cc:
> Date: Fri, 4 May 2012 10:19:17 +0200
> Subject: Selecting the right Soc for out ARM Notebook project.
> Hi ,
>
>
> Me and my company start to think about launching a project for a 13
> inches ARM laptop running ubuntu, with Specs on Par with the current
> ultramobile laptops.
>
> We followed the recent tryout :
>
> - Toshiba AC100 with tegra2
> - genesi with Efika  Freescale
> - Asus with the Transformer.
> - else ?
>
> Although I love my  AC100 I always feel that the Soc choice was not that good.
>
> It's usually a problem of open source GPU driver availability.
>
>
> The recent popularity of the All winner A10 , even if less powerful
> than some of its competitor Mali-400 is a great choice even if the
> drivers are not opened.
>
>
> i'd like to think all contributors to the Wiki page
> http://rhombus-tech.net/evaluated_cpus/ and the corresponding notes on
> source code access.
>
> I see that samsung Enyxos is also a good Start
>
> http://rhombus-tech.net/enyxos4410/
>
> And with the New Quad 1,4 Ghz , Do people think it could be a better
> choice compared to Allwinner A10 ?
>
> maybe for difficult to obtain for Mass production of PCB ?
>
>
>
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