Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 09:22:09 -0500 From: Gunther Schadow <gunther@aurora.regenstrief.org> To: Pico BSD <freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: MachZ PC on chip ... Message-ID: <39DC8E91.B1CFCA7C@aurora.rg.iupui.edu>
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This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------1C39B78278008B8B310228F2 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi, it's been awfully quiet on this list or did I miss anything? I have found the coolest thing since sliced bread (excuse this plaquative language.) It's the MachZ PC on a chip from a company named ZFLinux. This chip is supposed to be available for $80, sucks only 0.5 Watt and ... see for yourself. Has anyone of you any experience using this? It is a brand new product, may not even really ship yet. But who else has an eye on it? Would like to exchange a few words. The problem I found so far is that the company makes just the chip, you still have to solder it on a board (apparently with few if any additional ICs.) However, the only company I could find that would plan to ship MachZ on a PC/104 board asks over $400 for this. If the chip is only $80 and has a whole PC in it I do not see the point paying a $320 margin for a few parts and soldering. The point is that ZFLinux advertizes its chip with great cost savings and when you want to deploy SBCs in numbers (even below 100) every dollar counts. So, anyone got any insight or ideas? May be a few of us could form an alliance to ask a PC/104 engineering company to put together a MachZ based board for us? What I want is most all on that chip (including ISA, PCI, IDE, USB, SIO, PIO.) I do NOT want any video or sound crap added on that card (which they all tend to do :-(. Rather, I would like to see one or two 100BASE-T Ethernets. About 8 to 32 MB DRAM, and a flash memory device (a standard PCMCIA CompactFlash or DiskOnChip, we do have a driver for DoC, don't we?) Obviously all of this should be useable with our existing set of device drivers for FreeBSD. I cannot afford to develop another device driver for bleeding edge hardware. What would be cool is a felxible stackable system. Let's say, 1. Base module: MachZ, DRAM, 2 100BASE-T Ethernet. 2. Add on: SCSI2 3. Add on: video and sound (I don't need this) The idea here is that the first two ethernet ports are well suited for a router device or firewall or something. The SCSI2 host module would allow using the device as a stand-alone mass storage appliance. Video and sound for those who want to directly drive LCD panels for a control console (which I would always rather do using a telnet or web user interface.) What do you think? -Gunther --------------1C39B78278008B8B310228F2 Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; name="gunther.vcf" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: Card for Gunther Schadow Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="gunther.vcf" begin:vcard n:Schadow;Gunther tel;fax:+1 317 630 6962 tel;home:+1 317 816 0516 tel;work:+1 317 630 7960 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu org:Regenstrief Institute for Health Care adr:;;1050 Wishard Blvd;Indianapolis;Indiana;46202;USA version:2.1 email;internet:gschadow@regenstrief.org title:M.D., Medical Information Scientist note;quoted-printable:Al oppinions expressed in this message are my own and do =0D=0Anot necessarily represent those of the Regenstrief Institute. fn:Gunther Schadow end:vcard --------------1C39B78278008B8B310228F2-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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