BGA!? ACK. Hard to solder those, frankly. Well, there are BGA
sockets, I'm told.
This is an "embedded" processor, not particularly set up for a wearable
application - it's designed, for, say, a factory where you have a CNC
mill on the factory LAN, turning out aircraft wing skins under central
computer control. Or a microwave on a LAN, or whatever. Embedded
processors are those computers you have in your car's emission control
system, the computer in your VCR, the computer in your TV, and so on - a
computer used to control a "made thing", not a desktop / laptop / mobile
PC, per se.
Booting on applying power? My 80x86 machines all do that already - I'm
sure I'm misunderstanding you there <G> Standard "Microprocessor power
monitors", about $2 or less, will readily reset any processor on bad
power - and on startup. Easy enough to include one inside a large IC.
Aah, OK, I think I see what you read; What they mean here:
> Our patented FailSafe
> Boot feature makes it the only embedded processor that allows upgrades over the Internet eliminating the
> possibility of irrecoverable crashes. It is the only device capable of booting on power-up even if all external
> system software has been corrupted or is inaccessible.
- is that the internal BIOS will boot, and somehow "know" that the
external software is corrupt (CRC check or something, I would guess?) -
and connect to the Internet from it's BIOS, to load a replacement set of
software, to replace the corrupt external software. Probably
"watchdogs" and does the same re-load thing on watchdog failure.
("Watchdog" means you have a hardware monitor that, if not "fed" on a
regular basis, lets you KNOW that something's wrong - same as a pet'll
harass you when it's past time to feed them. When that happens, it'll
reset the processor normally - it means your software's "address
counter" has wandered off into "never-never land" and isn't working
right, or the CPU has hung itself in a loop that it's not getting out
of, etc.) That's a good idea with Flash RAM, with ROM style BIOS you
just re-boot on problems and the cosmic ray that caused a misread is
gone by the time you get back to the same memory cell <G>
133MHz, 2.8W means about 560mA at 5 volts - Not bad, if there aren't a
lot of other "glue" chips required that eat a lot more power.
I'm not sure yet how hard it'd be to make this run desktop-style Linux,
though. I would bet it runs a Real Time Linux variant, those are aimed
at embedded applications.
Mark
Rich Fletcher wrote:
>
> Can one delurk *again*?
>
> Semantic questions aside, I just read about a MachZ PC-on-a-chip by ZF
> Microsystems, and it comes with Linux (boot ROM, I believe--could make
> upgrades tricky, I guess). IIRC, it has USB, IDE, PCI and ISA (both at the
> same time!) interface capabilities, as well as booting upon application of
> power (I've read that previous similar chips don't do this).
>
> Estimated power consumption: 33MHz: 0.8W, 66MHz 1.6W, 100MHz 2.2W, 133MHz 2.8W
>
> Price: "as low as" $50. Probably bulk rate of course. Double for small
> batches, maybe? Beats me.
>
> Size: 35mm x 35mm, 388-pin PBGA.
>
> http://www.zfmicro.com has more info. I couldn't divine how fast this
> thing would run in the real world; maybe someone else could elucidate (or
> at least *guess*).
>
> I'm not a hardware guy (yet)--is this power draw reasonable? Is this
> nothing to be excited about? It's not a new, cheap, usable display, but
> hey--I'm only human. ;)
>
> -Rich
>
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