Chuck Robey wrote:
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Vincent Hoffman wrote:
On 9/4/09 07:56, Lars Engels wrote:
Quoting Chuck Robey <chu...@telenix.org>:
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I am truly impressed with that new handhelp computer, the Pandora. I
read
somewhere (I'm trying to find where I saw this) that the Pandora is very
compatible with the BeagleBoard. I was just wondering if any of the
work being
done for the ARM on FreeBSD has been ported to the Pandora?
I don't know enough about it, *yet*, but I'm working on it. Having
such a great
tiny machine running FreeBSD would be incredible. FreeBSD would be
my first
choice, if I'm going to get a choice.
What is Pandora?
I think he means
http://openpandora.org/
Which does look quite nice.
Correct. I've been daydreaming about getting a nice handheld for a long time
now, I dunno, maybe a decade now, but at LEAST since Sharp put out the units
which really started the entire idea. The Pandora, it's the first one I've seen
that really gets to a point that I've been happy with.
I wouldn't even consider something that didn't have a minimum of 640x480. I
also wanted a keyboard, even if it needed to be of a "chicklet" variety, but it
needed to be pretty close to something that could be described as a QWERTY
keyboard. I wanted a lot of RAM, lot of flash, and enough speed and power to
host it's own compiler. Up until now, I just didn't see anything else out there
that came close to meeting my minimums. Well, Pandora *way* more than meets my
minimums, and it does it at a small fraction of what I thought something like
that's going to cost.
I know very well that I can't afford this at the moment, but I went ahead and
got on the list to get one of these (it only caost me, base, $330). They info
about this is scattered all over, I don't *think* that there is anything like a
published spec on this, so grabbing the info on the Pandora means spending a LOT
of time on Google. I think everything is out there, just extremely poorly
organized. I've located the fact that the processor is a variant of the ArmV7,
a OMAP3530, which means that it's a 600Mhz processor integrated with a version
of TI's venerable 320-family of DSP processors.
Software wise, it's even better. It was designed using public newsgroups, and
making maximal use of public software. I'm not sure, but I think some parts of
it might be limited in distribution, things like NDAs might be involved here. I
don't like that, but it's still geatly better than any of it's competitors. TI
has made available software written for the DSP processor implementing the
latest version of OpenGL (ES?), so that the Pandora sports the best video 3D
output you could have dreamed about. It runs a very recent version of Linux, I
think that's 2.6.26. I'd REALLY like to get one of the BSD's here, I don't yet
know what the status of that is. Up until recently, OpenBSD had the best
support for the ARM, but I know works been done for FreeBSD, so I need to check
that out.
If it is a OMAP 3530, then it has an hardware OpenGL ES 2.0 core, that
can do something like 10million triangles/second. It also has hardware
acceleration for video decoding, and can mix and match them to two
outputs (one 720p, one analogue). The CPU is a Cortex-A8, which is
super-scaler and has floating point and SIMD. The OMAP reference manual
is available from the TI website, it's a couple of thousand pages though!
I've been evaluating these for work recently, and would really like a
box like the Pandora too.
You begin to understand why I'm *really* looking forward to getting the Pandora
delivered to me, in about a month of two. This stuff is really exciting, isn't
it?
If you want to know more, start at openpandora.org, but expect to have to spend
a lot of time getting the info together. I wish this weren't true, but unless
I've really missed a lot, then the info just isn't organized very well. If
anyone knows more about the things I'm interested in, please, talk to me.
Here's a few items ... about making a gcc crosscompiler, what's the --target
string? What kind of floating point does it use, what's the actual name used to
describe it? What's the status of FreeBSD's ARM stuff, does any of it work for
the relatively new ArmV7 (I think it's called the TI OMAP3530, with the DSP
being a Cortex A8). Same info for OpenBSD.
The DSP is not a Cortex, it's the 64x series of TI DSP. The Cortex is
Arm's latest CPU. Arm instruction sets are labeled as ArmV5, V6, V7 etc.
Then, Arm develop CPU cores that implement these:
ArmV5 ARM9xx such as an Arm926 processor
ArmV6 ARM1176 CPUs
ArmV7 ARM Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9s etc.
These core's are then licensed to chip manufacturers for them to use.
Duncan
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