Plug computers

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 01:11:20PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I have always assumed that it is cheap or free to license reference
> designs.  Possibly only if you use their chips.

Well if you don't use the marvell CPU, then the design is of no use
to you. :)

> If you can make it cheaper, and are willing to do so for others,
> without costing more, you might be a great resource for a community of
> pluggers.

And if that makes more people interested and the market gets bigger with
more volume, someone else will come along and make it cheaper than you.

> Of course that involves a few slippery slopes.
> 
> Make something small, and someone will always want to add "just one
> more thing".  I'm no exception.
> 
> - nice to put a switch chip onboard so that you could have the
>   five-port functionality of a normal home router
> 
> - nice to pick a core with current-gen ARM architecture (there may not
>   be a chip that has the right balance of features; at first glance
>   the current chip may be a local optimum).
> 
> - Lennart would like floating point
> 
> - Interesting stuff supported by 88F6281 but not brought out in the
>   plugs as far as I know (but I haven't really looked)
> 
>   + a second SATA port
> 
>   + FXO/FXS (for a telephone circuit)
> 
>   + PCI Express x1 (that seems over the top for these designs, but
>     maybe some minicard form factor makes sense)
> 
>   + MPEG2-TS (not quite sure how this works)

The OpenRD client does have most of that stuff brought out, and to me
is a much more interesting device than the plug ones.  Now of course
marvell does make a similar CPU that has hardware floating point, but
I don't know of any device that uses it yet.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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