On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 9:36 PM, Ken Phillis Jr kphillisjr@gmail.com wrote:
This is an interesting idea, but some more details are needed on the SoC. The reason for this is that the IC3118 is missing important features like USB OTG, Nand, HDMI/DVI, and Image Decoder.
it's entirely software-based: that's what it is: it's a hybrid of a GPU, VPU and CPU. there are actually two separate threaded parallel engines with hard-macro-configurable choices on the number of threads in each engine.
they also had to cut it down dramatically to get it into the available space for a 55nm die with only 210 QFP pins. so it was more a matter of "can we fit this hard macro for a NAND controller in? no, so it's out". they do however have two MMC interfaces, one is SD 2.0 eMMC compliant and 8-bit which is great.
so it is basically suited to being a high-speed embedded micro-controller, and as a low-end android option.
( There is also mention that this chip can only decode 480p via software ).
ah thank you for catching that.
There is another chip that features all of this and more, but I do not see as much details and that is the IC3228.
yes - the IC3118 is a precursor which with enough sales allows them to jump-start the next chip.
Also as a note, I do note that both chips use the same cores ( A custom RISC core with 150 instructions )
as i understand it, it's more than that (ok if you add the VPU extensions and GPU extensions)
On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 8:34 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
cpu cards being like buses, you wait for ages then 3 come along at once. i have been in touch with icubecorp, they have that awesome hybrid VPU/GPU/CPU core, and they decided to do a sub-$2.50 55nm 210-pin QFP out of it, running at 400mhz but quad-threaded. it's capable (on its own) of 720p video decode and 3D graphics *entirely* in software. the down-side is that this revision was designed as a low-entry android or embedded controller IC, so can only do up to 512mb RAM. they can do a respin but only with a large enough order.
this will be one of the very first FSF-Endorseable CPU Cards and it will be the precursor to a more powerful version which we will do later. the BOM is something staggering like only $12 and that's including a SMC9514 USB-Ethernet Hub. it is juuuust about EOMA68 compliant and the only extra interface will be an SD/MMC card. it will boot from SPI NOR Flash so that will be deliberately very small (enough to hold a bootloader).
l.
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