On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 2:17 AM, krasi gichev krasimirr@gmail.com wrote:
out of curiosity, i'd be interested to hear if the design that you are creating is intended for anything approaching a decade-long support and end-user lifespan.
First of all, I want to make it clear that my area is closer to industrial and sometimes automotive than consumer. Also, I am sure that I don't have your experience and I don't see all the details that you have seen - and large customers that expect the CPU cards.
And, the usual disclaimer, this post will not bring any creative ideas, it will explain my position, so feel free to stop reading here...
But what I have learned in recent years is that there is no such thing like "one size fits all". Even if something fits well at the current time, this is temporal and will change in several months or an year. In our devices, in past 10 years, we had passed over several form factors of "processing boards" - PC104, ISA, ETX, and some other, our own too. And what we got like benefits is limited to:
- possible second source - I hope the EOMA will be able to attract more that
one designer and producer of CPU cards
- possible upgrade of the CPU card - this works sometimes, but never for 10
years
ok, this intrigues me, that it is not clear why you believe that the interfaces selected would not last another 10 years. do you have time to go through them?
* ethernet. GbE. has been around for 2+ decades. do you expect GbE to be around for another 10 years?
* USB3. USB2 has been around for 2 + decades. it has been upgraded to USB3 which is 5gb/sec at the moment.. do you expect USB3 to be around for another 10 years? in fact, i understand that USB3 is to get at least *another* speed upgrade.
* GPIO, UART, I2C, SPI i think it safe to say that these will be around for at least a decade?
* SD/MMC. has been around for around 2 decades, and is constantly being upgraded. i think it safe to say that this will be around for another decade?
* RGB/TTL. has been around for 2+ decades. it's the baseline for video output. there's always going to be converter ICs, no matter what the latest-and-greatest standard.
i think it reason-ably safe to say that every single interface picked on the EOMA68 standard has a lifetime of at least one decade. as in there are reasons why every single interface has already been long-term and will continue to be so.
- maybe 2-3-5 years is realistic ( I mean in industrial, in consumer 1
year top); with current CAD tools it is not so hard to redesign to other form factor (you know it, you have made many desing recently)
yeees, but now you have set a MOQ for pricing for your clients. the purpose of the EOMA68 standard is to bring the benefit of mass-volume pricing *even* to this smaller custom run market.
Nope, I cannot even imagine that something (commercial) will live for so long. It might run fine but customers are always demanding new features,
how many of those features do not fit into USB3, SPI, SD/MMC and I2C?
better perfomance (even just better design).
what do you mean by performance? do you mean anything other than better CPU, better RAM, faster RAM, more RAM or more storage? because those are exactly what is on the CPU Card.
My point is (and probably I am biased by my lifestyle) that I will prefer to put the old one in the basement, or on the e-bay, and just go for the newest. Or, if you prefer, recycle it.
exactly! so just buy a new base-unit, keep the CPU Card, you have just saved 30% on the cost of a monolithic unit.
ok, there's a lot here, i have to get on, more later ok?
l.