Mail Archives: djgpp/2013/09/04/14:45:30
> Its CPU is called Vortex86EX, a new x86 SoC that we develop this year.
> The CPU runs at 300~400MHz and supports up to 1GB DDR3 DRAM. When
> running at 300MHz, its speed is nearly equivalent to Pentium 233. Most
> usual I/O are included in this CPU as ISA or PCI/PCI-E devices,
> including PWM, I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, USB, LAN, HD Audio, SATA, SD card
> (simulated as the standard IDE interface), ...
Thanks for info. I already has some experiences with Vortex86, we used at work this miniPC: http://www.asm.cz/zbozi/rb-262sxv2cf300mhz1x-lanfanless-minipci-2xcom.html Its was quite expansive that time, about 330$. I would call it 486SX on steroids. It even missing the FPU and standard debian kernel went panic :P After recompiling, I just don't remember that few kconfig options, then it worked. Does Vortex86EX have FPU?
You say "we develop this year" - are you the Vortex architecture designer? Cool. I tried a bit of silicon chip design at school but now I work with available ICs and integrate them...
Can you give some price guess for the board?
> DOS, Windows XP and Ubuntu/Debian can run on this CPU.
You didn't mentioned the VGA - how about user interface? Is it only terminal via UART? How windows and DOS can handle it? When I saw the zero board with PCI-E connector it come in my mind that it could share some memory mapped framebuffer to host PC...
Also it would be nice to add legacy SoundBlaster/GUS/GMIDI support. If you can do it directly on chip or by external CPLD. Or just wrote SMM handler trapping legacy IO and transforming them to HDA output. AMD did it similar on their Geode CPUs (VSA). I have one machine With Geode 300MHz and sound really works there without any special driver but the board is crippled because missing PS/2 for KB, just USB and it uses obscure NAND flash disc...
> The BIOS is developed by us based on coreboot and SeaBIOS, and will also
> be open source.
Good, I know one of CB developer, Rudolf... He already told me about biffer board but not about this project...
> SPI flash (simulated as a floppy).
Nice.
> DJGPP, currently integrated in the Arduino IDE with the help of DOSBOX.
What about QEMU with HDD image+freedos+djgpp? For those we still sticked on 32b no problem run native...
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