Was TI Really the Only Choice?

15 August, 2005 - 3:51am — feralaas

I realise this may be a stupid question to ask, but it would certainly put my mind at ease to know the answer.
Over the past few months, we have heard "Ti Sillicon is the best" countless times over, however, I am wondering if these chips were weighed against the Now-common Intel PXA StrongARM Chips (AKA Intel XScale).. The real problem i have seen in here with TI lies with the fesability of linux running under that arch. And, I understand the buisness point of view of cost against benefit, but were the TI chips _really_ more beneficial than choosing XScale (Where Linux is currently working - it runs on my PDA, and sponsored by Intel, HP and other big companies)?

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14 September, 2005 - 3:14am — feralaas

Ohhh.... I see.

That bit is understandible. The DSP capabilities of the TI is quite nice, true. The only thing that we will have to do is reverse engineer the lovely little chip.
Quick question, will TI sell chips to a private developer?

20 August, 2005 - 2:03am — Joe

it's not a dumb question at

it's not a dumb question at all and you'll see there was a considerable amount of discussion about this very point (look on the IRC logs for example). I'm not delighted about the issues you raised either, but the bottom line is that the price/power/performance really did point to TI. We pay something of an "open" penalty, but we really feel it's livable given the fact that it has a 200MHz ARM9 which is pretty open and this reference design is supported by a complete linux BSP from a couple vendors, so I do feel it's the best choice overall.

3 September, 2005 - 11:15pm — feralaas

Re:

Well, if the Ti DSP has an ARM9 core - why was the TI chosen over a generic ARM core with the "generic" intel PXA instruction set? Was it the cost per unit?

8 September, 2005 - 4:07am — Joe

TI advantages

The big advantages were actually performance. Yes the processor has a 200MHz ARM9, but it also has a customized DSP that's capable of encoding D1 (720x480) MPEG-4 video at 30fps. the xscale can't even play those files let alone to real time encoding. The DSP side is really what does the heavy lifting of the multimedia stuff. It's almost like you get a powerful CPU and graphics card in one chip.