07/09/2004 21:02:30, "Solutions IT WireScale"
<
info@wirescale.com> 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
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