[Arm-netbook] New Eoma68 housing idea

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 4:52 PM, Bill Kontos <vkontogpls at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is that the master plan you with Allwinner you mentioned somewhere else ?

 no it isn't.

> I'm very interested with the idea. The mere idea that you managed to get a
> new SoC going on on a reasonable node despite the cost intrigues me a lot.

 i haven't - i'm putting in proposals and finding candidate people to work with.

> So what about all the other ip blocks involved in the soc ? Realistically if
> such a small form factor wants to be successful it needs to have 3d.

 Nyuzi and MIAOU.  GPLGPU is out because... well... its designer
unfortunately doesn't understand that you can't modify the GPL by
adding a clause "this is GPL except if you want to use it for
commercial purposes then, well, sorry, but you can't", that's *not*
the GPL, it's a proprietary (closed source) license.  whoops.

 so, Nyuzi it is, along with MIAOU as a *separate* engine which will
do OpenCL and will need to be made use of separately (in software).
also great for parallel processing tasks as-is.

 there will need to be a *lot* of software development - even for the
hardware.  the lowrisc designers aren't *actually* developing any
peripherals: they're putting in what they call "minion cores" which
basically do bit-banging of various GPIO pins under their control, in
effect *becoming* peripherals.  (if it's dedicated bit-banging, it's
not really bit-banging, is it?)  the nice thing is: you can literally
implement any protocol you care to.

 i want to have a word with them to make sure that there's some
differential pairs connected to the minion cores, with variable power
domains.  that would make it *potentially* possible for people to
either use them as an open high-speed inter-connect, or to implement
various high-speed peripheral buses such as PCIe, LVDS, MIPI, eDP and
HDMI - all depending on whether the minion cores can handle it and are
set up to do DMA or not: just have to see.

 so about the only thing that would need to be licensed (at this
stage) would be DDR3 RAM interfaces.  everything else is covered from
opencores.org, including an LCD/VGA controller, USB2, and many others.

 VP8 and VP9 are available from google with no royalties if you are
going to production silicon.  MP4 can easily be obtained.

l.