07/09/2004 21:02:30, "Solutions IT WireScale" wrote: >I'm new to the list... Welcome aboard! >Since StrongARM 1110 becomes unavailable, are you planning to update the board >processor to Xscale? Yes, definitely. >If yes, which XScale processor and when the update would be available? PXA270, in the bigger of the available packages, and without any built-in (stacked) RAM & ROM. This looks to be the longest-lived device in the family - aiming at the embedded market, rather than the tiny stacked packages, targetted at cellphones and the like. The Intel rep promised this, but he proved (to be charitable) ill-informed on some other issues. I'm still hoping to get the prototype released by the end of the year. Progress is steady, and forward. >Are you planning to develop your own processor, since processor lifetime is short, Not necessarily - one of the main drives behind Balloon is to decouple people from needing to respin their board every time Intel re-spin their CPU (as they inevitably will do). Balloon will keep the same backplane connector, as far as possible, as the CPU evolves. Balloon3, f'rinstance, should drop straight into a slot designed for Balloon2. You get the improvements in the CPU (cheaper, faster, better / more peripherals), but not the hassles of needing to re-spin. However, by leapfrogging straight to PXA27x, Balloon3 should be manufacturable for 5 years. That's a pretty reasonable lifetime. In 5 years time, I'd expect CPUs to be sufficiently cheaper / faster / lower power to be a tempting proposition compared to PXA27x. >using an existing IP-core or something like that. Not sure if it is possible >though... I've been playing with the CPU cores in Xilinx and Altera FPGAs recently, for a customer. It's good stuff, but FPGAs age pretty much as fast as CPUs. It's tempting to build a soft-balloon, which fits into the regular Balloon slot, and FPGA-based. I'll know more, once I've completed the customer FPGA design (and this will only happen after the release of Balloon3). There are also issues in that the tools for developing the CPU cores in FPGAs are not free - sort of goes agains the grain, from a Balloon perspective). Balloon doesn't have the resources to make ASICs, and I certainly don't think that I'm a better CPU designer than ARM / Intel. Heck, I'm not even better than Motorola :) (However, if I do end up working on a CPU core of my own, it'll look a lot like the late, lamented Inmos Transpute, which modern FPGAs should be able to trivially fit. Mmm, parallelism...) Steve