Re: Suitable chipset for a pocket linux box
J.D. Bakker (bakker@thorgal.et.tudelft.nl)
Wed, 28 Jan 1998 01:19:37 +0100
At 5:17 PM +0000 26-01-1998, Jason McMullan wrote:
>Adam Wiggins (madman@zip.com.au) wrote:
>> Myself and a few other comp sci/eng studnets at the Uni of NSW,
>> australia want to do a little pocket linux box project. To get the ball
>> rolling we have to decide on a suitable chipset. I'm writting to ask what
>> the best arcitecture for this project would be. We need a low cost, low
>> power usage chip with a bit of grunt and with a solid nitch in linux
>> support. Mips comes to mind though i'm not sure of the power usage of
>> these. We'd rather not deal with intel though we may have to.
>> As well as the cpu we need a support chipset for standard i/o
>> using the laptop based interfaces like pcmcia or other popular standards.
>> The focus is nice cheap low power consumption hardware while maintainning
>> good software support from linux.
>> Please relay your comments.
>
> ARM. Low power consumption varieties available, reasonably
>good support from the manufacturer(s), As of 2.1.79 mainlined
>kernel support, etc. And cheap, too.
Don't rule out the PowerPC chips, though. IBM has some nice inexpensive
embedded versions, like the PPC403 series, with cache, DRAM interface,
multiple DMA and more goodies. Do a search on the IBM website; there's
pretty complete documentation on all chips.
Jan-Derk Bakker.
PS: Without trying to revive the Netstation, is anyone interested in
helping development of a cheap modular multiprocessing engine with these
(or similar) chips ? I'll have to design some bare-bones boards for my
daytime job anyway, and a simple message passing interface isn't too hard
to add. All fs/network/UI functions would be carried out by a 'normal'
Linux frontend.
--
"... I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab.
I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate.
All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week.
Time... to die...". - Peter Gutmann in the scary devil monastery