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SubjectRe: Suitable chipset for a pocket linux box


On Wed, 28 Jan 1998, Gabriel Paubert wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, 28 Jan 1998, J.D. Bakker wrote:
>
> > At 5:17 PM +0000 26-01-1998, Jason McMullan wrote:
> > >Adam Wiggins (madman@zip.com.au) wrote:
> > >> Myself and a few other comp sci/eng studnets at the Uni of NSW,
> > >> australia want to do a little pocket linux box project. To get the ball
> > >> rolling we have to decide on a suitable chipset. I'm writting to ask what
> > >> the best arcitecture for this project would be. We need a low cost, low
> > >> power usage chip with a bit of grunt and with a solid nitch in linux
> > >> support. Mips comes to mind though i'm not sure of the power usage of
> > >> these. We'd rather not deal with intel though we may have to.
> > >> As well as the cpu we need a support chipset for standard i/o
> > >> using the laptop based interfaces like pcmcia or other popular standards.
> > >> The focus is nice cheap low power consumption hardware while maintainning
> > >> good software support from linux.
> > >> Please relay your comments.
> > >
> > > ARM. Low power consumption varieties available, reasonably
> > >good support from the manufacturer(s), As of 2.1.79 mainlined
> > >kernel support, etc. And cheap, too.
> >
> > Don't rule out the PowerPC chips, though. IBM has some nice inexpensive
> > embedded versions, like the PPC403 series, with cache, DRAM interface,
> > multiple DMA and more goodies. Do a search on the IBM website; there's
> > pretty complete documentation on all chips.
> >
>
> Or the 860 from Motorola, which includes a 100Mb Ethernet in some
> versions. And Linux was being ported to this chip recently (don't remember
> who was doing it).
>
> Gabriel.
>
>
>
Or the ColdFire serie, again from Motorola. They just announced a new
version, the MCF5307 which has cache, 2 serial port, DRAM controler,
IO, debug port, some internal ram, timer, etc. It is cheap (15-20$) and
very performant for the price (70 MIPS). Finally, GNU C compiler is
ported.

The ColdFire serie a basically a 68000 with some instructions removed to
make the chip much smaller and much more performant (like 20X for
the 5307).

Claude


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