On Tue 24/05/11 07:16 , "P.J.G. Long" <
pjgl2@cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> The low end console/display market seems to be moving HDMI, they are
> becoming more common on netbooks. I can see for a number of low end
> users using it as the cheap route to a display. See the Raspberry! Looking
> at the feedback I think there may be a market for the Balloon as the up
> market interfacable unit
This still isn't a use case.
Is it simply that, without a monitor connection of some sort, it's not a 'proper computer?
During development, there will always be a desktop / laptop machine being used for compilation, and it'll have a decent display, on which X works well, also serial terminals, xterms, ssh, whatever. Who really wants yet another monitor on their precious desk space, running scaled HDMI? That implies another keyboard, too.
During product use, it'll have whatever display it has. More likely to be an LCD of some sort, or PAL / NTSC panel, or a few LEDs & buttons, than an HDMI telly.
In short: If you want to drive an HDMI TV, a PC is probably cheaper.
You've obviously got mains available, so you don't care about power. You've obviously got space available, so stick a Revo on the back of your TV if you want to pretend to be 'integrated'.
If I exposed the DSS as 28 precious GPIOs on a connector, (or 24 GPIOs and SPI3), and let people add an HDMI chip & connector, would we sell any of those, ever?
Would we sell any IO boards that sat there instead and protected those (1.8V) GPIO pins, and exposed them at student-friendly levels & connectors?
If DVI/HDMI over USB works as well as it seems, then why would we want to sit there squandering precious memory bandwidth spewing pixels down a wire? Plug in a display when you want to do a demo on a projector or something, but the other 99% of the time, run headless.
(The memory bandwidth issue isn't specious. 720p60 is 240MBytes a second, of unstoppable high priority data. Not sure if it pollutes the cache or not.)
(I'm trying to think of a time when you'd want both Balloon's FPGA resource, and a genuine framebuffered, pixel-painting display on a TV, and I can't. Something that needed the 3D graphics engine of the OMAP, on a projector, maybe?)
Steve
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