Dvi contains a z80, but it doesn't run an OS and wildly outclasses the M100 itself in every possible metric of functionality.
It was common for peripherals to equal the host at least in the earliest days. You'd have a z80 in the desktop and a z80 in the 300baud acoustic modem. Perhaps it's just a matter of terminology. If you think "peripheral", I at least ask myself, What is the point of the M100 in the combined system, when the "disk drive" part already has collossally better versions of everything in the M100? Just stick a usb keyboard directly on the Pi. However, this is also true: A pc running a tpdd server isn't a peripheral, it's a server. The dvi could be seen as a server too. It makes no attempt to be portable like the M100 itself. No one can have any problem with a server being more powerful than a client. Or less powerful for that matter. A file server might be a super powerful raid box with 8 xeons and 128G of ram, or a single Pi with a usb drive. It was common in the early days for peripherals to roughly equal or even slightly outclass the host. The host might be an Apple II with a 6502, while the 300 baud accoustic modem might have a z80 in it. But like the dvi, the peripheral will have less ram and be running a tiny dedicated rom. The peripheral won't have it's own vga, hdmi, usb, and nic interfaces and a general purpose OS that could use them. Today, many peripherals run full OS's hidden inside, but they are much less powerful than the hosts which use them, and many peripherals are dumb with no power and no OS. I have always used docking stations on all my laptops, and so far they've always been very "dumb" relative to the laptop. Just boxes of connectors and interface chips and just enough firmware and controller to glue the interface chips together and provide some kind of communication bus with the laptop. There is another dimension of "this is pointless" or "this is bad math" which goes directly the other way, which is price and practicality. A design that uses only plain logic with no or very very little "brains" appeals to me a lot more than using a whole complex PC running Linux just to run a program that emulates the crude logic. And using a cpld or fpga to implement that logic instead of discrete 74 series ttl chips works for me too. But a DE0 fpga dev kit costs 3x as much as a Pi and is far more difficult to use. In THAT sense, it makes no sense to use the fpga instead of the Pi. So it's just personal engineering preference. I would rather the fpga solution even if it costs more in parts and is more difficult to produce and is less flexable all in all. But I recognize that it is arguable and a matter of taste and easthetics. Now that we know that our motherboard chipsets have their own entire cpu, ram, rom, and full general purpose OS right inside a chip that is otherwise just supposed to be just a chip with a fixed function, ALL bets are off by this point. On Feb 17, 2018 9:09 PM, "John R. Hogerhuis" <[email protected]> wrote: > I guess I’m on the other side of this at least computing power wise. > > It doesn’t bother me that peripherals have more power than the model 100. > At all. In fact, subjugating a super powerful device to model t indentured > servitude has a certain appeal :-) > > DVI does. NADSBox does. palms I used to run dlpilot did. PCs running > LaddieAlpha do. Wimodem232 does. > > But maybe that’s not the issue? Maybe the problem is the linux machines > need to be booted up and unless you take special measures, properly shut > down or you end up corrupting the filesystem. > > I have used them in embedded systems that get hard power cycled but we > needed to a bunch of stuff to reduce chance of corruption. > > Best bet for using Linux is you need a battery circuit and graceful > shutdown if power is lost. There are off the shelf boards that do this. > > — John >
