Marcin Juszkiewicz - avr32

New architecture on my desk

2009-04-08T10:45:00+02:00

Yesterday I unpacked Atmel NGW100 developer board. It is simple board without any whistles etc. but result is cheap device for those who wants to play with AVR32 architecture.

Board contains:

one serial port (female instead of male)
two Ethernet ports (I got 40Mbps with iperf)
USB device port
SD/MMC socket
JTAG connector
32MB sdram
16MB flash
few expension connectors with extra signals
footprint for mictor-38 connector for NEXUS emulator

And this is how it looks on my desk:

Atmel NGW100 board

I had to connect it like that because of female serial port I had to plug it directly to FTDI adapter because I lack straight serial cable :D

How many serial ports are enough?

2009-04-07T15:41:00+02:00

My desktop has few RS232 ports:

one FTDI RS232-USB converter
one connected to mainboard
two on additional PCI card (which also gives me parallel port)

When I got BeagleBoard I had to remove the one connected to mainboard — connected that cable to BB itself. But today I got new package from Atmel: NGW100. And it means need for serial port too…

What for I use all those ports? Developer boards of course :)

BUG
BeagleBoard
At91sam9263-ek from Atmel
NGW100 from Atmel

To end that crazy situation I am planning to buy extended version of card which I use now but with 6 rs232 ports instead of just two. Will lose parallel port but I never used it and if will ever need it there will be a card with it somewhere in drawer/box.

I never thought that will need so many serial ports…

Does Vortex86sx based devices are worth something?

2009-02-20T16:39:00+01:00

At FOSDEM 2009 I grabbed one Vortex86SX based device — Koala Nano PC which is available at Koan software. Device came with Ångström distribution and was running 2.6.26 kernel. I wanted to get something more fresh on it and after some fighting I booted 2.6.29-rc5 kernel today.

Device use Vortex86SX SoC which is based on 486SX core. Yes — this is x86 machine without FPU. Overall speed of that is… nearly not existing.

First benchmark which came to my mind was “hdparm -T /dev/sda”. Results were dramatic: 9-13 MB/s for cached reads (with 133MHz memory and 300MHz cpu). I decided to compare against other devices:

Device	Arch	CPU	CPU speed	memory type	cached reads
Koala Nano PC	x86	vortex86sx	300MHz	DDR2	9-13MB/s
old PC	x86	pentium2	266MHz	EDO DRAM	33MB/s
ATNGW100	av32	AT32AP700x	130MHz	SDRAM	35MB/s
ASUS WL-500gP	mips	bcm3302	266MHz		46MB/s
Freecom FSG-3	arm	ipx42x	266MHz		43MB/s
iBook G3	ppc	g3	300MHz	SDRAM	65MB/s
AT91SAM9263-EK	arm	at91sam9263	180MHz	SDRAM	62-63MB/s
Compulab	arm	pxa270	312MHz	SDRAM	74MB/s
NSLU2	arm	ixp420	266MHz	SDRAM	74MB/s
Koala nano33	x86	vortex86dx	1GHz	DDR2	74MB/s
Nokia N810	arm	omap2420	400MHz	SDRAM	82MB/s
AT91SAM9G20-EK	arm	at91sam9G20	400MHz	SDRAM	96MB/s
Linkstation pro duo	arm	ixp4xx	266MHz		147MB/s
BeagleBoard	arm	omap3530	500MHz	mDDR	152MB/s
Alix.1c	x86	geodelx	500MHz	DDR	209MB/s
kirkwood reference board¹	arm	kirkwood	1200MHz	DDR2	209MB/s
BUG	arm	i.mx31	533MHz	DDR	294MB/s
my desktop	x86	core2quad	2400MHz	DDR2	3300-3500MB/s
Cliff’s desktop	x86	Core-i7 920 Quad	2.67GHz	DDR3	6400-7200MB/s

But remember that this test is not so good for benchmarking — I am preparing better set of tests to really compare speed of devices. So far it contains openssl speed and MP3 encoding/decoding.

But device has also few nice things. Everything is integrated so 12x12cm box is enough to keep everything inside. It has ATA controller, FastEthernet, graphics based on XGI core (with accelerated framebuffer able to do 1680x1050 resolution) and working USB. There is a place to put 2.5” HDD inside (normally it boots from CompactFlash card), second Ethernet or WiFi are available options…

But what is use for such slow device? There are lot of ARM based ones which offer similar (or better) functionality and are faster… But wait — there is one use: event displays as this machine has nicely working framebuffer (I got even 1680x1050 resolution).

UPDATE: added results from iBook G3 300MHz and some other machines.

kirkwood reference board uses same cpu as SheevaPlug device. ↩