Did anyone make a design with a Vega so far?

[marios]

Posted on May 03, 2005 at 17:39

Did anyone make a design with a Vega so far?

[marios]

Posted on April 30, 2005 at 00:24

Just curious about how did it go in the design with the Vega. Was the documentation adequate? Were there good or bad surprises? Were there undocumented bugs or bad functionalities in the chip?

[twitwity]

Posted on May 01, 2005 at 15:41

i did 3.5'' HDD size PC with vega. integrated ethernet MAC is almost unusable. (no linux device driver available. even no hints in any documents about the driver and no request for hits are responded) once manipulated the hardware right, it showed good working status. ( i recompiled and ran kernel or software on it. it works stably..) it uses 3.3V IO and on PCI and ISA side. i had to use 5V devices together, which shows the waveform on board a liitle bit awkward..

i think the performance is generously good.

- no ACPI supported.

- APM still not fully supported. well, this maybe due to linux tuning. i had to see to it later time.

- PLUG & PLAY BIOS shows some error linux can not recognize BIOS dats structure. same as above.

well, consumer 2 and atlas sows almost terrible io performance such as disk IO when it is loading inside bus with graphic data. sometime IDE control data shows no response at shutting down the system. this is suspected to be configuration mismatch in compilation of the kernel.

at first time, the documents may have people confused regarding memory configuration. i had to consider alot of things and should make a hard decision. well in the end, i managed to refine its meaning. and anyway, memory system sorked fine.

the data sheet and programmers manual is lack of applicational information . and related resources are almost rare. the resoponse time with ST staff is not so swift..

one thing more. i saw taiwanese company which producing embedded PC with vega (a PC-104 like form factor.) and germany procudt too. well, i dont exactly be sure about germany one..

[ This message was edited by: Twitwity on 01-05-2005 19:19 ]

[marios]

Posted on May 03, 2005 at 01:19

Thanks for your answers twitwity. So the core part of the Vega is stable. With the news about all the layoffs and product streamlinings at ST, I hope that ST isn't going to kill the Vega before it gets any chance to build a momentum.

You have done a Consumer 2 or Atlas design too? Have you been told any product life for these parts? I have been hurt hard with the termination of the STPC Industrial before the expected dates.

[twitwity]

Posted on May 03, 2005 at 05:17

In korea's case, STmicro almost prevailed in Settop box industry as the dominant architecture. about 2 or 3 years ago, STB industry turns to some modification like PVR with attatched HDDs and IP settops which need network functionality and around that year, IBM's STB series based on their famous 405 architecture , and SIS and VIA announced their integrated-video-SOCs to the market. the earlier architecture is definetly lacks CPU throughput and peripheral power relative to their new competitors.

So at that time and a little bit later ST released consumer2, and ATLas. i was almost in similar field as STB. so i had a chance to review and test consumer2 and atlas for our base architecture.

the conclusion is 586 and similar architecture can not give enough power to run our application feasibly. - the 16 channel embedded DVR wlth superpower video performance at HD level display ability.

and it should do 16 x 2~4 Mbps stream transfer internally. from encoder module , to encoder nodule, bidirectional IDE path, and bidirectional Network path almost at the same time at peak load.

i gathered experience about consumer 2 and atlas at that time. (and this is why i am so sorry about the Pictor.) for now, i chose VEGA for some other reason. it's support for MMX performance relative to NS-GEODE. not the AMD one. our test showed it feasible to encode 4 channels in MPEG4 stream with MMX optimised encoder code on VEGA. of course, AMD geode successros mave maybe much throughput in both CPU and MMX. but we dont need extraneous power VEGA fits quite good to our application.

in short.

consumer 2 even ATLAS has apparent competitor in the market field. and they came out of the need to compete with them. and with the view of general application for it, i think atlas was well steered. so ST won't easily cut them out of their lines so easiy.

unless ST, the forerunner in these field would suddenly decide to widthraw from the business field for any reason.

[ This message was edited by: Twitwity on 03-05-2005 09:07 ]

[ This message was edited by: Twitwity on 03-05-2005 09:08 ]

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Attachments :

stpcmarch2004.zip : https://st--c.eu10.content.force.com/sfc/dist/version/download/?oid=00Db0000000YtG6&ids=0680X000006HtsP&d=%2Fa%2F0X0000000aYF%2F5CA.cZnGUVELhuCRo.5rVNJisp0DRrrYNkc00UcAIDM&asPdf=false

[marios]

Posted on May 03, 2005 at 17:39

Thanks again for your experience. So the Vega is not an orphan, they have some design-ins. Are you using the Lynx EM in your design too? Did I read somewhere that SiliconMotion has stopped doing this part? This is really too bad for the pictor. They should have done that one first. Just moving the graphics engine from the Atlas was enough. I guess that the design team has been dissolved.