More Fun With 1 Chip Systems 77
Anonymous Coward writes "Axis, maker of the ETRAX system-on-chip, has just announced a multi-chip module that has the same pinout as their ETRAX SOC but which contains over 50 components. According to this article at linuxdevices.com, all you need to add is an external 20MHz crystal and power, to end up with a fully functional networked Linux system. It contains 8 megs sdram & 2 megs flash. Now you can really put Linux anywhere! The estimated price (when it hits production) to buy these little goodies is $75 (qty 1) down to $50 (qty 10K). "
Re:What do you do with these? (Score:1)
Sorry, but $75? (Score:1)
for under $100? At that scale?
I understand the size factor... pin-outs to all of these input/outputs. your connectors will be more space consuming than your actual hardware. But the price? Did I fall asleep and wake up in 2020 or something? Walk into a computer store and see how much they get for a SCSI card, IDE controller, NIC, and PCI USB card... And all that, in the size of a pack of paper matches, for under $100?
Well, the size does suprise me, a bit. But I really would like an answer on the Price thing. Can someone tell me how they make and sell this for $75, or is that a ./ typo?
Re:Sorry, but $75? (Score:1)
Yea, but not at that price... (Score:1)
Maybe... (Score:1)
Video... Who the hell cares, if you can telnet/ssh to it (ssh might be a bit of a cpu hog for the encription/compression though).
embedded doesn't mean no storage... (Score:1)
That's not a troll! (Score:1)
Just because it's another point of view, doesn't make it a troll... Just look at the link, look at the ports listed in his link. Look at just one example like hpcmips [netbsd.org] and try to say it's not relevent. NetBSD has a long standing history of running on cheap, cool, novel hardware. This would be almost "too easy" for NetBSD.
After all, we're talking embedded now, it's a VERY valid point to bring up something other than Linux, and point out the tons of other cool hardware out there in this arena.
Re:External clock source (Score:1)
My understanding is that they developed essentially at the same time. I mean, the early PC's were built by hobbiest around the early microprocessors like the Z80, 6502, and the 8008. Was there really an embedded market that existed before those early microprocessors? What did they build systems with? The computing industry back then was still pretty much "mini-computers", which meant racks and racks of discrete SSI (and maybe some MSI) components to make up what we know today as the CPU.
I wasn't around in those days, though. Was there an embedded market that coexisted with mini-computers? I'm curious what an embedded system from back then would look like.
--Lenny
External clock source (Score:3)
Yes, you can. I used to work on microcontrollers that had a low power mode wherein they shut off the external crystal, and instead used an internal ring oscillator for a clock. This is a big power savings, but the oscillator made for a poor clock: it was slow and it's period varied wildly. The uncertainty made it unacceptable for anything requiring accurate timing...even, in some cases, memory accesses. Still, it was useful for some things.
I think most commonly, the micro would go into this low power state, and sit in a loop, periodically polling it's serials. If anything interesting happened (say, change in position of a machine assembly), it would kick the clock back on and, once stable, execute the appropriate control routine, which likely required accurate timing.
Microcontrollers are really quite fascinating. It's amazing what you can do with just a very little computational power. The hackers who stayed up nights bumming single instructions out of their ASM routines in the early days of the PC now have a home in the embedded world, where resources are still tight.
--Lenny
Re:Don't think desktop, think embedded (Score:2)
Those need low power systems. I don't think this has been designed to be a low power system. They also need cheep, my last GPS was $120, replacing the DragonBallEX ($25) with this would bump the price, and lose the LCD display...and none of them need a ethernet nearly as much as a 802.11 wireless net...
Those would be a better place. However I'm not sure it would be ideal for the PVR, that needs a drive controller, and an interface to the MPEG encoder(s), or at least the decoder and tuner devices...
I don't know exactly where I would use one. I assume they are already in web cameras though. Actually it might be decent for use in a stereo with a dedicated MP3 decoder (however if you do it all in software you could switch to Ogg/Vorbis later, so there is something to be said for faster CPUs there).
It is a safe bet that they pretty much designed this for themselves, and are selling it to anyone that has a use for it. Not a bad way to go, as long as the people buying it don't cut into your web cam market :-)
Re:Don't think desktop, think embedded (Score:2)
I'm not sure a 100Mhz 68000 can do great machine vision algos, but it would be pretty good for less intensive tasks. (Yes, it isn't a 68000, but despite them advertising it as a "RISC" CPU, the instruction set is very very similar to the 68000...and I don't imagine the performance will be any better...)
Re:Possible manufacturing applications here... (Score:2)
I wonder if the computerized machine tool manufacturers have thought about this?
Yes, for this application the ethernet support would be an asset. But what support does the package have for analog/digitital IO? This is the be-all and end-all in industrial control. Even the lowly 68HC11 has onboard A-D.
Also don't forget, industrial control tends to be the wooden-spokes and horse-powered side of the industry. It takes absolutely ages for anything current to find its way onto the factory floor.
--
Re:The problem with these things..... (Score:2)
Heck I found a place that has BGA sockets. They were glad to sell me a socket for $160.00USD it had tiny springs and cone points to secure a solid connection to each pin etc... but adding that kind of money to each BGA chip makes the project worthless to try and forces the home hacker to just either buy a dimmpc or a PC-104 board.
On a side note- Thank you Hitachi for not making only bga, every SH series processor is available as QFPA.
The problem with these things..... (Score:4)
I have tried hot-air to get a BGA to solder to the board without luck you never get all pins soldered without either an commercial IR or Hot air rework station.... and for some reason us home hackers dont have an extra $40K lying around to buy one.
If they want wide acceptance and use... produce it in a hand solderable version (Not DIP, good grief no... DIP is evil) it will make life easy for us home prototype builders and the corperate guys that dont have to take over a rework station just to try a design.
Re:The problem with these things..... (Score:1)
Think different :) (Score:1)
10 of these should make for a heck of a Beowolf cluster. Also, ten of then will "eat" a whopping 12 watts of 3.3volt power. They're also rather small - should be fairly easy to build "Beowolf boards", able to tackle many compute-intensive tasks on a minimal size- and power-budget, and not too much of a dollar-budget, too.
I can't think of anything I do that could use this idea, but I'm quite certain that a dozen other
Way-cool idea, guys!
Re:Obligatory (Score:2)
/me ducks and runs
Feh. (Score:1)
Dual EtherMACs, triple host USB ports, phat FPU, audio, VGA/LCD/TV, 200MHz ARM920T core. It's supposed to cost less than this MCM kludge and be available sooner. Did I mention that it will run Linux?
Re:So small.... (Score:1)
Re:External clock source (Score:1)
Oh, yes, you bet.
Before the 6502 and the 6809 and 8085/6/7/8 & the Z80 there were at least a couple of previous generations of stuff like the 8008 (and before it the 4004), another from Fairchild called the F8, Intersil's 1600, RCA's 1802 and three or four others that were in an old book I thought I still had around here, but I guess not..
Believe it or not, the 8080, as scummy as it was, was a "best of breed" that pushed a number of even less capable competitors off the map. I'm _not_ talking about the 6502 or the 6800, they came later and were superior. Something like an 8008 or an F8, a few support chips, a 64-byte static RAM, and a 256x8 fuse-link PROM (or often much, much less) could replace several dozen RTL or TTL chips, and this kind of equipment took over many complicated logic tasks (like say, "dumb" terminals or printers or modems) _long_ before they could be equipped with the kind of storage it takes to make a PC.
I could rant on, but I'm not real solid about the facts and the dates and certainly not the part numbers, so I think I'll go read this:
http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/jbayko/cpu.html#Sec
There's plenty out there to be found in the area of microcontroller history.
Re:I know nothing about hardware (Score:2)
Re:I know nothing about hardware (Score:4)
Re:What do you do with these? (Score:2)
Cheap competitor to Palm.
Homebuilt robotics.
Arena-grade laser tag SBC.
Keychain network diagnostic tool.
Keychain security client.
Wearable computer system.
Re:Sorry, but $75? (Score:4)
( I'm one of the people quoted in the recent EEtimes article about Axis and Linux :
see http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-0
You can have SCSI / IDE etc - you just need to add some resistors and cheap buffers.
The rules about what can be combined with what are complicated and you have to work through them.
I've managed to lay my board out so it can be I built with :
4 serial + 1 IDE
or
4 serial + 1 parallel + 1 USB
or
3 Serial + 1 IDE + 1 USB
or
3 Serial + 2 USB
I could have got some SCSI options in there too - but didn't bother because I don't need them.
It's a very flexible chip and very capable at what it was designed for - doing I/O
Re:External time source (Score:5)
Concievably you could build a prescaler to handle the fast oscillator and scale it down to a managable speed but since a free running oscillator will have a rather imprecise speed, this prescaler must be designed very carefully.
The lack of a predictable clock will also be a detrimental for the end user as performance will vary rather wildly.
The use of an external timing source will enable you to stabilize and normalize the clock speed, which is exactly why you want a crystal.
Use of higher level timing sources like a heartbeat over ethernet is not apropriate as proper reception of such data really requires an accurate timing in the first place.
Generally reception of data without sunchronization is possible as long as the data is recieved much slower than the local clock. This way we can sample the data signal fast enough to make sense of it. I doubt such a scheme is appropriate for ethernet. (since the ethernet driver is on board you need to sample the ethernet signal directly which means you need a timing insensisitive way to transform the ethernet symbols to simple logic level signalling. I doubt this is a trivial task)
Re:What do you do with these? (Score:1)
Re:Feh. (Score:1)
I will be thrilled if a complete EP9312 based system ends up being so inexpensive that it forces the price down on the other stuff.
Re:I know nothing about hardware (Score:3)
There are a bunch of oscillator technologies that don't involve crystals that can be mounted on an MCM. They are either less precise or much more expensive than a crystal.
The ethernet interface needs a precision clock, or it won't work right. So a cheap truly solid state oscillator won't do.
Home HVAC (Score:1)
Re:Real hak0rs... (Score:1)
So small.... (Score:3)
Cheap beowulf clusters? (Score:1)
You can just swap out individual chips as you upgrade the system. Plus, the cluster would be much MORE compact since you don't need big cases/motherboards. You could run thousands of nodes within a single cooling cabinet.
It looks like these chips at at least 100MIPS processors which puts them on par with 80Mhz Pentiums. About the same order of magnitude of processor the recent article was about.
Re:Sorry, but $75? (Score:1)
mance of 100MIPS." thats straight out of the data sheet.
and as for what you are saying about pricing, i can get an ethernet controller for around $1, thats not a pci card, thats a controller. I imagine they get rid of a lot of overhead by not using a pci bridge. Also, it doesnt have a video card.
Re:What do you do with these? (Score:1)
Re:Maybe... (Score:1)
Re:future (Score:1)
Re:External time source (Score:5)
Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Morse Code has no accurate clock, and works just fine. (I'm not joking or patronizing in pointing this out. Your question is a good one.)
A "latch" signal is one which tells a related circuit that it is okay to perform some task: "the data is ready to read", "the data is ready to write", "the inputs are ready to combine", etc.
A "clock" is just a way to organize many circuits on the same latch signal. All data must be ready at the same time, and then the clock strikes, latching all the circuits that use that data. Most simple data circuits will work if you clock them once a year, instead of once every few nanoseconds.
A clock has to be set to a period that the worst-case circuit can cope with. If it takes a circuit a long time to generate its results, the next circuit had better not be latched too early, so the clock is slowed to make sure the results are always ready in time.
Parallel printers work on a single latch, and no clock is needed. Other communications would be possible quite easily without the assumption that latches always occur at a fixed frequency. Ethernet may be trickier, but it's the same principle.
Re:The problem with these things..... (Score:3)
I don't mean to be rude, but maybe they don't care about the "home prototype builder." I mean really, if you can't spend $40k on a proper station or send out your parts to be assembled by a contract house, then how many chips are you going to buy? 1? 5? 20? That's nothing. What these people would care about is selling in volumes of 100k/year to a company that makes embedded systems.
Additionally, when you start to get a very large number of components on a chip you're going to have a lot of pinouts and that just isn't cost-feasible in a PQFP package. BGAs are designed for large die and a large number of pins, that's why they're used. I work at a semiconductor company that's making a big move into SOC and from my experience every major company I've talked to wants BGAs for these types of parts. The only people who want PQFPs are those who aren't going to buy in very large volumes and it just isn't worth putting the chip in a whole other package for these people. Not to mention the fact that a 600-pin PQFP just isn't possible no matter who's asking for it.
It's unfortunate that the home prototype builders can't build their own boards at home anymore but that's just the way the industry is going. You can't blame this company for making their part available in only a BGA: it's just not possible to keep PQFPs around anymore for both economic and technical reasons.
- j
Re:So small.... (Score:1)
small computer
Re:The Demise of Hackable Computers (Score:1)
External time source (Score:3)
But I wonder, could an inaccurate on-silicon clock be used to drive the system slowly until it could pick up an accurate time signal from some other source? I'm assuming that the easily built oscillators are relatively stable.
The "obvious" idea of using NTP to query external clocks in order to compute one's own frequency obviously wouldn't work, since without an accurate clock you can't communicate... or can you? Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Yes, this is all windy speculation, but I'm hoping that someone out there will have more of a clue about this stuff than I have.
Re:I know nothing about hardware (Score:4)
I've designed boards with microprocessors on them, and I appreciate the external crystal. The more I look at Axis's products, the more it seems like they actually know what they are doing.
Re:I know nothing about hardware (Score:2)
Re:External time source (Score:1)
Re:Think different :) (Score:2)
Re:External time source (Score:1)
Serial communications (and any electronic communications really) depends on both sides using a fixed clock of the same rate (baud rate). This is so that the UART, after it sees the start bit, knows how long after that is bit 0, then how long after that is bit 1, etc.
For parallel printers, etc, the latch IS the clock. When the circuit on the data detects a falling or rising edge (I forget which) on the clock line, the circuit knows that the data on the data lines is ready and valid.
Anyway, serial (e.g., RS-232) wouldn't work reliably without a reliable clock.
Cryptnotic
Re:Think different :) (Score:1)
Possible manufacturing applications here... (Score:2)
Re:Sorry, but $75? (Score:1)
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Re:What do you do with these? (Score:1)
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Re:Sorry, but $75? (Score:1)
One thing I noticed is that the SCSI interface is multiplexed on the same pins as EIDE/Parallel and serial ports, so it looks like you cannot have all of those capabilities in the same chip.
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Why *not* desktops? (Score:1)
So how about a simple, cheap, desktop machine, with (say) basic web, email, word processing and spreadsheet software? A simple little box available for about £200, kind of like an Amstrad PCW for the 21st century.
Unless you're doing huge amounts of audio, video or 3d graphics, or playing processor-heavy games, you just don't need the latest £1500 Gig-everything PC. Some people just want to send email and type up letters, and don't want a huge box with more cooling fans than a Citroen XM.
Re:External time source (Score:1)
On some of them, you'll find a 50/60Hz switch to allow for running them off either mains frequency. Because the voltages are different as well, the switch is usually a trace that you can cut on the PCB. All it does is change the divider ratio.
Re:Think different :) (Score:1)
Because the Duron will take a lot more power to run. Chips with x86 architecture are generally going to be more power-hungry than a cluster of fast, low-power processors.
Re:The problem with these things..... (Score:1)
Ahh...Try getting a flat square of copper and put the BGA chip on it...heat it up with a good, blunt soldering iron until the solder is all melted...with pliers, quickly switch the chip. That should do it.
Re:The problem with these things..... (Score:3)
Re:Run dsniff on this! (Score:1)
Now we just need a special distro with the right tools, scripts, etc. that fits into that 2MB flash.
Whether I point this out first, or someone else does, it is probably going to happen. I find it interesting that the budget to build such a bug now moves from the realm of national intelligence services to something anyone could build.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
Run dsniff on this! (Score:3)
I've dreamed of being able to "clip" a tiny device onto an ethernet port (or even put it inside the wall box behind the faceplate) and have it run dsniff and or mailsnarf. Then at 2am it would e-mail the day's results to a throwaway hotmail account, or irc into a secret channel, or somesuch.
This device could be called a "bug". But now with an SOC that costs $75, someone good with a soldering iron could probably build a bug for $150. This puts such a computer network bug within the budget of a teenage hacker. Wonderful. Just imagine the potential.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
Or you can get a uCdimm (Score:3)
Legos anyone? (Score:1)
Beowulf :) (Score:1)
What's new? (Score:1)
Re:The problem with these things..... (Score:1)
Re:External clock source (Score:1)
Re:Possible manufacturing applications here... (Score:1)
I know nothing about hardware (Score:1)
Re:future (Score:1)
Don't think desktop, think embedded (Score:5)
Hmmm, seems like one or two early posters seem to think that we will see these chips in desktop PCs (asking about USB, ATA, SCSI support, etc). But if you expect to find these ETRAX system-on-chip units in a desktop PC, then you'll be looking in the wrong place - because they'll be in embedded systems.
With 8MB SDRAM and 2MB Flash memory, these chips could be running your next souped-up GPS device, your next smart (landline) phone, your internet-savvy fridge, your second generation PVR, etc, etc.
As we move to a "chips in everything" society, lower power, highly integrated processors like this one will run countless devices. Today they may cost $50, tomorrow they will cost a fraction of that and will be just about everywhere.
Re:Don't think desktop, think embedded (Score:1)
I don't know exactly where I would use one.
How about a robot?
I figure you could get one of these, plug in some sort of storage (say, a laptop hard drive) and a wireless LAN, and bam! Very small robot brain. This might be powerful enough to do some of the stuff (like vision processing) that results in people sticking a laptop on the back of their robot. Furthermore, I figure putting everything on one chip will result in the system working better when that other robot's trying to beat the crap out of it.
--This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma.
Re:Please don't encourage them. (Score:1)
Indeed. Fortunately, I had the distinctive pleasure of being able to put this guy's pink slip right into his inbox the next day.
WOW, I am glad I don't work for you and I feel very bad for anyone who does. Not only are you closed minded about new ideas, but you fire people for having new ideas and to top that off you aren't even man enough to fire them in person, you send them email. Nice Guy
I know I should not feed the trolls, some times I can not resist.
The Demise of Hackable Computers (Score:2)
1. It doesn't matter how blank-boxed they are, as long as they are small and cheap?
2. There isn't a huge interest in hacking computers per se; rather, what we care about is modularity-for-the-buck? (I suspect this is the case for me: what I want are things I can buy for under $100US that can be hooked to other things in the same price range in some meaningful way to build (random-string (cons '(a gravity meter) '(an automatic bubble maker) '(a marsupial trap) '(a woodpecker conditioner) future-projects-list)).
3. Most people here only read every fifth thread these days?
-- MarkusQ
future (Score:1)
What do you do with these? (Score:1)
D/\ Gooberguy
pcmcia connection ( wireless card ) (Score:1)
Re:So small.... (Score:2)
You know, I was just about to fall rabidly in love with this chip, having read the spec, until I noticed this.
-
You can't hand-solder BGA's
- And even if you tried, you'd need an X-Ray machine to check the work
Still, if you've got the budget to do the soldering I think this makes a perfect beowulf^Wscalable network storage node: 4 EIDE ports leaves 4 fat (6.25Mb) serial ports for intra-cluster communications and that fast ethernet port for serving the data outwards.Actually, those serial ports make it looks a very small amount like a transputer or the 21364 Alpha chip; at $75 a chip and 100 MHz, more like the transputer I suppose. Now, imagine using the serial links to do fault-tolerant distributed lock management and request forwarding, and the EIDE for snoopy-NAS. (You can't do disk-mirroring on one node, so don't ask to. You have to do mirroring across the network.) 4*$100 40GB drives, $75 CPU, $50 512MB ram, $50 PCB, $50 power. $625 for a 160GB storage block.
Now, that would make an interesting cluster-app.
fx:reads website.
fx:jaw drops
Looks like someone already thought of that.
Respect for the development board [axis.com]; it's got screw terminals. Now to justify this from the development budget ...
Re:External time source (Score:1)
Feel free to laugh and call me a total idiot 'coz it's insanely inconstant if it is, but if you could split off a signal from the AC/DC converter that's powering the chip with each cycle, you'd have a 60hz clock.. that's also horribly slow too come to think of it... multiplying this thing by the 333,333.3.. to get it out to 20mhz would amplify those errors nicely too...
Ok... probably not such a good idea.. but an idea anyway
Re:Home HVAC (Score:1)