[Arm-netbook] The Potential at Hand. (Was: device tree not the answer in the ARM world)

[Vladimir Pantelic]

Oliver Schinagl wrote:

> Lets assume Vladimir only plays legally obtained DVDs, doesnt care about
> Blu-ray or whatever is the new fad and is happy with its resolution. But
> having a swapable CPU card, would allow this fine DVD player to live
> even longer. Swap out the old 200 MHz DVD player dedicated card (if it
> would have  had that) and put in the new 1 Ghz A10 card. With a mini-USB
> wifi dongle, you now have a DVD player that can also browse the web.
> Stream media from the network or simply playback burned dvds with a
> various amount of codecs, so that new high-res tv that you got, can be
> usefull with your same dvd player.

but see, this old DVD player has SD analog video outputs only, it has 
no ethernet either nor a USB host. So yes, I could swap the CPU 
brains, but what for? to decode HD video and then downscale it to 
blurry analog SD?

> So yes, I even see potential here. TO me, I think back when you first
> had those DVD players that had USB ports on it, that could playback
> divx, but nothing much after that.

yes, still it's only SD, no HDMI out. of course my Bluray player will 
have HDMI out, but maybe not the variant that can support 4k or maybe 
my TV by then will have only LightWave(tm) inputs for 8k 3D holograms
or whatever. And it will have only USB2, but all my new movies are at 
an insane high bitrate so it needs to be USB3 etc. So, just changing 
the brains will not make all these new peripherals appear on old 
hardware. Soon, we are at a PC, with a bus to plug new hardware, just 
that even that bus changes every few years...

> Granted however, a DVD player can be had for 25 euros these days so that
> might be a bad example.
>
> But if you look at really  old  stuff, I see a lot of devices that have
> been obsoleted because of performance reasons, not really hardware
> reasons, as said before over and over, screens, keyboards etc are all
> still fine, just that CPU is way to slow in our current day and age.

no they are not, I don't have any old screen still in use, they are 
VGA only and at a resolution that I really don't want to use any more.

I do use a 25 year old keyboard though, but that is mostly about the 
mechanics, the electronics inside I can change any day if I wanted...