[Arm-netbook] WonderMedia SoCs

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

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crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 12:11 AM, Dima Krasner <dima at dimakrasner.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm Dima (more info about me at dimakrasner.com) and I'm new here, so ...
> hi.

 hii dima, nice to meet you.

> For years I've been following the ARM scene, since I'm very interested in
> libre hardware projects.

 cool

> Chinese ARM netbooks with WonerMedia chips (8850, 8880, etc') are very
> common in sites like AliExpress and Ebay and they're pretty darn cheap.
> Performance, RAM amount limit and decoder performance should be reasonable,
> compared to other cheap ARM boards.
>
> I see the WM8950 has been evaluated, but the wiki doesn't say what's wrong
> with it. As far as I can tell it's yet another Mali-400 board.

 the issue is: we have no idea to contact to get a Reference Design from.

> Although I understand while the A20 is preferred to WonderMedia chips (it
> makes life easier on the software front, probably more than any other
> non-x86 SoC), I wonder, what makes them unacceptable in RYF hardware? Is
> there any technical issue that I've missed?

 they're most likely acceptable... but if you can't even get a
datasheet let alone an example design with the DDR RAM already laid
out, it's something like a $40k risky investment of a *lot* of time
(multiple revisions) to get it done.

 and i just haven't got time.

 if you happen to *know* where to get hold of a full Reference Design
of something with a quad-core especially an arm64 WM SoC that's in
28nm or below, then i'm definitely interested.

l.