You might notice on the block diagram; SSI/I2S x3 and SPDIF Tx.

SSI is Freescale's flexible serial core a bit like the MPC5200B PSC. It supports AC97 and the like. I2S is an embedded audio standard - usually Bluetooth chips and anything that pushes other audio signals into a larger codec use it, but you CAN have a full sound solution over I2S. You can also have it over SPI, which the i.MX515 has by the bucket. Check out the Wolfson codecs.

And it has digital audio out. That'll make some people happy.

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Matt Sealey

that board does seem limiting in what it offers :(then that increases cost for the user. its not bad to have to add that, it does leave that as an option for the user, but i think alot of people use ethernet. and i think its pointless to have hdmi and skip the audio, what good is that ?if its a freebie i guess go ahead and use it :Phopefully genesi can make something better :)

It's for OMAP development.

It's not going to bring about world peace.

No, it doesn't have everything you need to implement a 100% full media center solution in a board the size of the palm of your hand.

That's a given.

What about opinions from people who actually used one? I can't believe nobody here signed up for Projects and didn't entertain the idea of using a Beagleboard for something at some point, and I can't believe out of hundreds of Projects participants, nobody actually bought one..

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Matt Sealey

WoW!,

I'm impressed by the decision, this shows the smart you are changing at time.

IMHO, This is the greatest move done at Genesi, and even Freescale. It's all about the COMMUNITY SIZE and actually this is around ARM low cost and powerful SoCs with embedded graphics (CORTEX-A8 w/ OpenGLES).

If you do a board ASAP like Beagleboard with Freescale = a win-win situation.

This will be crowed of people, not like right now..... declining.

I actually thought about buying a beagleboard but decided against it. E.g. there is no public available opengl-es driver yet for the beagleboard.

It's PowerVR SGX in the OMAP right?

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Matt Sealey

I'm not a developer, but I'm certainly interested in this board... I'm looking at possibly going ARM for a low power server build.

Here's what I would need for the server build...

~1 GHz Cortex-A8 (or ~600 MHz Cortex-A9MP dual core, but... that's a whole 'nother thing.)
Dual SATA (I know the i.MX515 doesn't have this - at least I'm not asking for hardware RAID, I can do all that in software.)
Dual ethernet (I know, that doesn't appear to be on there, either.)
Support for 1 GiB RAM

That's pretty much it. I know it's not on the chip, but if you're thinking of making this so that more of a consumer would be interested, not just developers... a SODIMM slot would be nice, rather than soldered RAM, dual ethernet would be a useful option, SATA would be very useful, and PCI and/or PCIe would be useful (especially if you can't get SATA or a second ethernet controller on there.)

Why?

If it supports up to 1GB of RAM and ships with 1GB RAM soldered to the board, what advantage is there in having 1GB SODIMM on board?

We can buy RAM chips cheaper than you can buy SODIMMs.

As for the rest of the outlandish ideas of dual SATA and dual ethernet; this is a consumer-device targeted chipset. Most PC motherboards don't even come with dual ethernet.. I'd wonder why you really needed two ethernet ports on an ARM server, really.

If you need that kind of peripheral support, Atom is still the way to go, just multiple your power estimates by 10x compared to the ARM chip, and expect no better performance.. but at least you will find a dual-Ethernet, dual-SATA Atom board out there.

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Matt Sealey

What happens when the onboard RAM fails?

1 GB SO-DIMMs are dirt cheap, or at least you
could offer a little more profit for your
resellers, by letting them supply the RAM.

You think this is likely within the lifetime of the device?

It's more than likely that the SoC would fail at the same time, or some other component.
2GB of RAM would cost downwards of $5 to buy and solder to the board on any given system.

I'd like to see you bid at Micron or Kingston and get the kind of bulk prices you'd need to make selling seperate RAM worthwhile.

There really is no economy in providing an SO-DIMM slot, anywhere.

(this is of course in situations where the chip actually supports slotted memory. The MPC5200B does not. Neither does the i.MX515).

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Matt Sealey

The profit margins on RAM-modules in Sweden are
20-30%. Should be easy to make even 50% when
bundled together with your hardware.

I don't think you offer those kinds of margins
on your products. The reseller has no option but
try to sell a complete system to the customer.

You'd charge customers $40 extra for the exact same specification?

We'd rather pass the benefit of our purchasing power to the customer. If that gives resellers a hard time, then resellers obviously need to do more than simply deal in hardware units, and add some kind of value to the system in other ways. Perhaps a custom case, different graphics cards etc. were possible with the Efika.

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Matt Sealey

I was more thinking for potential expansion, but I personally wouldn't be opposed to having the gig of RAM soldered to the board. I'd just prefer expansion capabilities. But, if it's not supported, it's not supported. Fair enough.

Anyway, the second ethernet would be because this could also be my router. It's not mandatory, I could keep on going with the WRT54G as my router.

Dual SATA is the only thing that is mandatory for my purposes, and I'm sorry, USB to SATA converters are not the answer. (I'm not even asking for a SATA RAID controller, I know that's too much to ask for. I'm fine with software RAID. ;))

Neko:
By soldering memory onboard you won't be giving
the customer any purchasing power at all.