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Re: netwinder (strongarm)

Roland Orre wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 4 Oct 1998, Brian Glenn (NC) wrote:
> >         My only concern with this netwinder thingy  is that Compact now
> > owns the rights to the Strongarm chip  and has  allreadly "considered"
> > selling the rights for both the strongarm and the Alpha to Intel. Which
> > would of course  just kill the chip's devolpment. And on another note does
> > anyone know when the projected date for the second generation for the
> > netwinder is (I would like to get one but I want to wait till the second
> > gen). So any additional info out there about either of these conserns?
> 
> If this is true about Compaq it is really serious and bad for the
> society. Of course it is very easy for software developers if there
> is only one hardware, only one OS etc, but to keep the evolution
> going we need manifoldness and I would not have believed that Compaq
> would be in that urgent need for that quick and dirty money. Ok we
> still have some other forks on the chip family tree, like the powerpc
> but for how long?
> 
> In the long run it would maybe be nice if there could develop a kind
> of free chip, a hardware equivalence to the GNU/Linux OS, but that is
> probably still far away in the future.. Or..., any ideas ?
> 
> /Roland Orre
> -----------------------------+---------------------+-----------------
> Roland Orre                  | O---O---O Studies of|
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  I've thought of playing with designing & building a machine optimized
for Linux/wearables, it's such a big project though!

  Some newer microcomputer chips designed for embedded systems are
potentially suitable in some ways (For example the newest members of the
family of the 16C57 PIC that is in many mice, if I'm remembering it's
part number correctly) - these chips can run down to DC (so if you want
"suspend", just stop the clock {or even slow the clock to a halt
gracefully}, temporarily.  Makes power savings pretty easy!) - they have
"Sleep" commands, watchdogs, A/D converters built-in, and all that -
combining a bunch of those to make a CPU with Video & all for a
wearable, is "a little larger" of a project than average <G> 
Potentially doable, but who will put in the effort?  (Imagine a machine
that adjusted it's speed as you needed more or less resources, to just
enough to do the job, though!  These little chips run up to months off a
little 9V battery...)

  These chips are getting faster & eating less power & getting quicker,
and getting more capabilities, so who knows what'll happen?  Should be
interesting...

  Mark, 

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