Removed by mod.

Don't feed the trolls. He's just trying to start an argument. He won't be starting any more.

Last edited by Darrin on 06-Mar-2013 at 12:32 PM.
Last edited by utri007 on 05-Mar-2013 at 11:58 PM.
Last edited by utri007 on 05-Mar-2013 at 11:56 PM.

@KimmoK

Sad to hear about your job. Tough market now?

Freescale announced a new chip today, P4081. Unfortunately they can't even agree with themselves what the differences between 4040/4080/4081 are, but it seems it's pin compatible with the other two. Only 1.2GHz, so not impressive. But if it actually has more PCIe controllers than 4080, it might now finally be pin AND PCIe compatible with P3041/P5010/P5020. Which would be a smart move on their part.

However, they sort of suck at announcing, they put new information on the webpage, failed to put the same information (the new chip is mentioned, but with different features) in the P4 family fact sheet and COMPLETELY failed to produce an updated datasheet. That's not much of an announcement

Fair pricing, 117USD from 100 units, 1GHz. That's in the P2041 territory price wise, but with twice as many cores, twice as many serdes lanes and twice as many DDR3 controllers. However, all of this adds to the routing complexity.

Been toying around with the P2041 and microvias, got it down to 1 layer PCIe and 2 layer DDR3 routing, with 6 layer total for the board.

http://home.samfundet.no/~olegil/p2041_hdi_step1.brd
http://home.samfundet.no/~olegil/p2041_hdi_step1.sch

Only now I'm thinking I should try a 4 layer board without the microvias, just to see how far it's possible to push this baby. However, 6 layers is considered standard these days, and 100µm microvias shouldn't add much cost. I'm using layer 1-2, 2-3, 4-5 and 5-6 100µm microvias, 2-5 200µm buried and 1-6 250µm normal vias. And the good thing about microvias is the increased ability to group DDR3 byte lanes on single layers, this would be impossible with normal vias.

Last edited by olegil on 06-Mar-2013 at 12:40 AM.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

"Sad to hear about your job. Tough market now?"

I just was too far down in the "food chain". I was replaced by a guy from company that was in the middle. (I was a subcontractor of a subcontractor. I now applied directly to the head employing firm and I'll see what comes.) Anyway, I'm not in a hurry to get another job, I should survive financially for year and half without huge sacrifices, just must keep my touch in coding etc...

Now need to finish the "house building hobby" that I have had for the last 10 years. My home office is done, sauna etc. to go. In about month everything should be done.

Nice to hear about the progress of your HW design.
What kind of sum does your "bill of materials" now show for a simple system?

I will be back on the HW matters, when I have more time.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@KimmoK

My BOM is fairly empty still, just the SoC and some slots. I was actually not making a motherboard, just toying around with different ways of escape route the BGA. As an educational time-waster, as it were. But I might start adding some useful components now, like GbE PHYs, USB hub (two ports simply aren't enough with 2 mPCIe sockets onboard), SDHC, SPI flash, PSU parts etc.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.