some thoughts on SAKC

Bas Wijnen wijnen at debian.org
Sat Feb 27 17:30:56 EST 2010


On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 12:09:40PM -0800, Ron K. Jeffries wrote:
> To the extent that SAKC is used WITH a Nanonote, it could
> easily be used as an extension to host computer.
> 
> Having said that, I think the idea Carlos has floated of
> implementing an interface from SAKC to emulate
> SDIO is *very interesting* because I can see that
> being a very high bandwidth connection from
> Nanonote to SAKC with the two physically side by side
> to enable SAKC to "plug in" to Nanonote.

I see the possibility, but what is the use case?  What can a
NanoNote+SAKC combination do that only SAKC cannot?  If you want a nice
development interface, a full-size keyboard and screen are useful, so
you'll want to connect to a full-size computer.  If all you want is
adding i/o to the NanoNote, you can do so with a cheap controller from
MicroChip (pic) or Atmel (AtTiny/AtMega)[1].  They should be able to
implement an SDIO interface without trouble as well.  Extending the
NanoNote over the SDIO interface is interesting, but not with such a
powerful (and therefore expensive) device.

[1] They are just as closed as the Ingenic chips from a HW side, of
course.

> Even though SAKC will have an Xburst SOC, it does
> not require a great deal of imagination to think of
> interesting configurations where Nanonote does
> background activitiies, and tells SAKC what it wants
> done, and also does additional processing to
> data pulled from SAKC that would otherwise
> big down the SAKC CPU.

Which programs will use this coprocessor?  It might be used by a library
with a (slow) fallback to not having it.  However, I don't really see
any program which would really want to use it.  Of course I'm not
stopping anyone to build things; I'm just not convinced about the use in
combination with a NanoNote.  As a standalone unit, I think it can be
very useful in a lab environment.

> Having an Xburst SOC on SAKC drives it's cost
> up by maybe $6. That's easily worth it.

It is.  But it also means you no longer need a NanoNote with it.

> Let's let Carlos and his talented team do their thing.
> Others may wish to invest their time and energy
> elsewhere. And that's OK. ;)

Fully agreed.

> In any case. let's not make the mistake of attempting
> to design SAKC by commitee.

I wasn't trying to.  But I do think it's a good idea to let them know
what we think about it, so they can choose to be influenced by it (or
not).  They decide what they do, but they don't need to have all the
ideas themselves. :-)

Thanks,
Bas
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