> Hello,
> I wanted to throw out some thoughs about this project and see what
> people thought. It seems to me that two things are certain:
>
> 1) The price/performance ratio of RISC processors will only get
> better in the future.
Correct. Although nobody can pay the latest developments.
Look at the R4000PC. Only *one* year ago it was around $2000,
now it's at about $600...
> 2) It will take a (fairly) long to design and debug this thing.
Don't know. This depends on how complete the NEC ARCset is. So far I
know solves it most of our problems. In case it is true that the
ARCset is a *complete* design, we would only have to make some
changes to satisfy the requirement of the group. Perhaps we have to
make no changes at all !
> I know that it would be difficult, but given the above, I believe that it
> would be good to try to predict how long it will take to design the board
> and its operating system, and to try to predict what the cost of the
> components
> will be at that time, and design on the basis of that. I realize that this
> approach is full of risks, and would be difficult to do, but I am afraid that
> if this approach is not taken, the board my be obsolete by the time it is
> usable.
Neil made the assumption that it will take a bit more than half a man-year
to port the kernel and drivers. This depends on how many filesystems we will
support. For me, ext2fs and the ISO fs would be enough.
Everything else *should* compile out of the box, except the X11-server stuff.
That sounds not too bad, isn't it ?
I can't say how long it takes to make the hardware working, because it
depends on what we want.
Andy
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Waldorf Electronics GmbH | Phone: +49 (0)2636-80294
R&D Department | Fax: +49 (0)2636-80188
Neustrasse 9-12, 53498 Waldorf, Germany | email: andy@resi.waldorf-gmbh.de
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|