[Arm-netbook] EOMA server standard

[Gordan Bobic]

On 10/26/2012 03:57 PM, luke.leighton wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Mehmet Mersin<mmersin at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 8:24 PM, luke.leighton<luke.leighton at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Roman Mamedov<rm at romanrm.ru>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> So I believe that with EOMA, "1 Gbit ought to be enough for anyone." :)
>>>
>>>   i'm slowly coming round to this as well, for exactly the reasons you
>>> say - which is that low-cost, low-power parallelism should eat
>>> high-cost, high-power serialism hands down.
>>>
>>
>> In one of the previous mails, you said you'd consider making a
>> different design / spec for server version. I think no one will use
>> 24+ pins reserved for rgb output in a server system.
>
>   no - that was referring to the existing EOMA-68 standard, which is a
> standard designed for mass-volume appliances, *not* servers.  EOMA-68
> just happens to include USB3, 10/100/1000 Ethernet and SATA-III.

So you are saying a EOMA68 "desktop" card can't be used in an EOMA68 
"server" chassis? That's a serious limitation. What can be done to make 
them compatible on the overlapping pins/features?

>> I think for a
>> server version of an EOMA standard, these pins are better used for a
>> second 1Gb ethernet and a second SATA port and even a second USB3.0
>> port or PCIe.
>
>   yes.  but in doing so, you now force *all* devices to have *exactly*
> those features.  they can NOT be optional.  so if the standard
> requires 2x 10/100/1000 Ethernet, then any SoCs which do not have 2x
> 10/100/1000 Ethernet are automatically excluded.  likewise for any
> other features.

Why can the features not be optional? Why is it necessary for the card 
to support 2 ethernet ports just because the chassis can handle it? Why 
not simply leave those pins disconnected?

Gordan