yea, totally.
Also, I bet there will be a big handful of mechanics who get a nice 10A buzz when they remove the panels without properly discharging the capacitors first.
My first question would be about the power that board is consuming ddr3 support (800+ MT/s). Keep in mind that transistors sink the most amount of current (i.e. consume power) when they are in the process of switching from '0' to '1' and vice versa. So if The bus speed has just increased by at least a factor of 4, then power consumption might have increased proportionally. A think a performance-per-watt graph comparing the Exynos chip and a dual core atom is in order (ahem.... tom's
My next question would be, "where are the Mali GPU drivers?" A free as in speech implementation of all patent unencumbered interfaces of this GPU would be brilliant. Can't wait to talk to the Linaro devs
Some of the legacy projects I've worked on would have a hard time supporting 64bit x86, never mind an architecture that changes the endienness.
ARM EABI
It's often ___immeasureably__ useful to get some (any) kind of console output when porting Linux to an existing device running e.g. windows mobile 5 or 6. Take a look at HaRET. Porting is often harder than most would imagine, as some manufacturers actively use hardware obfuscation methods to prevent hacktivists from getting console access.
Try to imagine how long it would take to use LEDs or haptic feedback to iteratively check all conditions required to bring up Linux on a board without a serial port. The first thing you would probably do is try to use a hardware subsystem that was known to work and fashion a serial port out of it. This is the same concept but graphical.
Great work!
yeah!
Seriously - if a company no longer supports a product that still has a fairly large market, a lot of (particularly north-american) people will just throw the product in the garbage. Look at the billions of __WORKING__ cellular phones that end up in landfills. If users were given the freedom to improve the firmware on these aging products and make them relevent and useful again, we could give those devices away for free to people in the world who need them, or resell them.
It's better than waiting 1 million years for something to decompose in a landfill.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand