> 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.
I'd love to use powerpc but i'm sure they are a very expensive
option. If they have a cheap portable series then ok but unless they are
cheap they are a no go. We can put some money in now because its been
assigned as a thesis project to one of the undergrads.
>
> 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'd be very iterested as this is the sort of thing i want to do
for my own undergrad thesis in a few years :)
Cheers Adam
> --
> "... 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
>
>