I did a quick test this morning on the BeagleBone and XMOS, with squeezelite , without top running I get clicks every 5-10 secs or so, and when top is running I always get a click when top refreshes. With sox playing a wav file I get a click every 2-3 minutes and occasionally a click from top.
The UAC1 async seems to be solid no matter what. I have been looking at the freescale processors, I don't think the imx5 line will do us good, they are just missing too many things. The imx6 looks like it might do well for us. It has built in HDMI, S/PDIF, I2S, ehci USB, good memory interface. There are two devel boards, both for $399, the SABRE board looks closer to what we want, there is a good probability that the image that runs on it will run directly on what I want to build. Unfortunately it comes with android on the SD card so we will have to get a linux image (they say they have them). These are actually quite inexpensive, less than half the price of the TI ones. There are three reasons that keep me from being enthusiastic about these: 1; they do not have device library files for the tools I use, I will have to make them myself 2; the ball layout is not optimized to make it easy to route. This takes an 8 layer board and more work. Fortunately we don't really use a lot of signals 3; only single memory port, this makes routing 2 chips (to get 512MB) much harder One interesting aspect of the SABRE board is that they give you the board layout files and encourage you to use them in your design. Unfortunately they are the wrong format, but I can look at them and see how they did it. This will probably help mitigate 2 and 3. The AM3874 is a wonderful chip from every aspect except non ehci. Even though it has more pins, they layout has been optimized to make it much easier to route, AND they have the library files in the format I use. It has two memory controlers which makes memory layout much easier AND gives you twice the memory bandwidth. The USB controller does have hardware scheduling but it is not ehci, without testing we don't know whether it will work well. I did look at the Allwinner A10, unfortunately detailed documentation is non existant, the only thing I can find is the 83 page "spec sheet" which doesn't really say much. I get the impression you only get the real data when you sign an NDA with the company, which is a little difficult for a comunity project. It may be a great chip, but I just get a very bad vibe from it, that things are going to be almost there but not fully implemented properly. But you can get a cubieboard for $50 to try it out. Getting small quantities for a project such as ours is also going to be tough, I have not found it at any distributors and companies such as this usually only sell in 1K lots. One interesting aspect is that the imx6 is almost the same price for a way more capable chip. I think I'm trying to convince myself that the imx6 is the way to go. If so its $399 to get the demo board, which is a little out of my pocket range right now. If we decide on this I will need some help from the "community funding" part. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
