On Mar 10, 2005, at 1:57 PM, Joshua Uziel wrote:
* Mike Hartley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [050310 13:31]:Yikes....25K? That's some mighty expensive beer. ;-)
Oops, my bad... it's $30k as stated by Sean Adams earlier today in the thread titled "Open firmware for SB2?"... see:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/gforum.cgi?post=35296#35296
If there were a GNU toolchain for it, then I'd be a little more tempted.
:)
If you are interested in the ip3k processor please check out these links:
http://www.ubicom.com (the manufacturer)
http://www.silicondust.com/ubicom/forum (forum operated by Nick Kelsey, a former ubicom employee. He is trying to negotiate a scenario where smaller customers could get cheaper/free access to tools and OS)
http://www.seanadams.com/ip3k/cpu_module (some information about the processor module we designed, which is used in Squeezebox2)
The ip3k is a brand new processor architecture, and Squeezebox2 will be one of the first products to ship with it.
The base toolchain is GCC and I believe all the current support for ip3023 is in the main fsf branch.
However the operating system, which is not just an OS but also software implementations of the PCI interface, ethernet MAC, 802.11g upper MAC, etc etc, plus a whole pile of other tools, plus the reference designs, plus the programming dongle, plus a whole pile of other things are what you pay for in the dev kit.
But the compiler is GCC, and this does mean that if we could work out a suitable loader mechanism, it might be possible to break out the interesting pieces like audio codecs, visualizers, and geekport drivers. We are also investigating ideas like a forth interpreter, which would be perfect for making visualizers (assuming FFT and graphics primitives are taken care of in native code).
Also, this is a hardware multithreaded processor, which means it runs like 8 separate CPUs all connected to the same memory. Already the DSP stuff runs in a dedicated hardware thread. It might be possible to dedicate a "customer thread" for client-side plugins and other hacks.
Anyway we are still really busy with SB2 production right now. Once we're shipping and everything is humming along, there will be more time to spend investigating this. Again, as usual no promises on what we'll do, or if/when we'll do it. Just sharing some info about what might be possible and what the issues are.
Also yes, of course we have a strategy WRT competitors which will limit what gets opened up under what license.
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