[hpsdr] Blackfin

[Chris Albertson]

> LOL, I'd like to see some specs on mini ITX boards, to know how 
> serious this problem would be.

I've used them once.  The spec refers to a physical form, not the
electronics.  So just like a regular size PC main board you can
buy these with different CPUs and so on.  Basically it's just
a shrunk down PC.  Typical specs like a 1Ghz Celeron.
700Mhz Intel Core Dual or 700Mhz Pentium M.  Tyicaly one
SIMM slot for RAM but you can buy big SIMMS. 

Cost is in the $300+ range more or less and expect
them to require 70 ~ 100 watts of power.  Many have built-in
fans and heat sinks.  There must be 100 of them on the market.
You pay a premium for the smaller size and take a performance
hit as well as compared to a full size PC main board.

But what can one of these do that a Blackfin can't do? 
They still don't have the high speed interface you'd want.
After all the ITX is still a PC and comes with the same 
USB or Ethernet that your desktop PC has.

The Blackfin can do about the same job but with much less
power and heat and 10X lower cost and 8X lass space.

All that said.  I don't care.  Once you put the processor
inside the front end box you've solved the interface problem.
Deciding which processor to use is an engineering detail
that you can decide based on cost, space, power and so on.
I've used system with Intel, SPARC, Alpha, ARM and other
processors and frankly from a user's erspective you can't know
which is being used and even as a software engineer many
times you don't care because you are writing in C. The stuff
a should be doing right now gets compiled to bot Intel and
SPARC but would run just the same on PPC or MIPS

When the processor is in the box what comes out of the box is
the detected "product" be it audio, Morse code, Weather Fax,
or text along with some control and display data.








Chris Albertson
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278 at yahoo.com
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson at aero.org
  KG6OMK/AG


 
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