Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 07 May 2013 22:44:59 -0500 | From | Rob Landley <> | Subject | Re: device tree not the answer in the ARM world [was: Re: running Debian on a Cubieboard] |
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On 05/06/2013 03:55:11 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 9:01 PM, Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> wrote: > > You realize that nobody except Samsung and Apple is currently > making money > > in the smartphone space, right? > > ok, ok - substitute "tablet" or "laptop" or "media centre" for > "smartphone" . actually it doesn't matter what the product is, really. > the economics are the same: by the time you get to over 100 million > units, the software development costs are somewhere around the 4th > decimal place.
Actually it does. (That was the whole point of the video I posted a link to.)
mainframe -> minicomputer -> microcomputer -> smartphone
We've seen this dance before. The new thing will coalesce into a de-facto standard. (The interesting tablets are big phones, not small PCs. The "surface" is this generation's microvax.) All gets back to economies of scale again...
> > Yes, you can install Linux on cheap plastic pieces of nonstandard > crap that > > have already ceased production before you can buy one. It's about as > > interesting as hollowing out a Furby and making it run Linux. > > tell me about it. now you know what drove me to come up with the > Rhombus Tech initiative. been there, rob, and decided i didn't like > being fucked about, and decided to do something about it.
I'm attempting to hijack android and convince it to evolve into something usable (as I descibed in the ELC talk, starting around the 30 second mark), but day job's leaving me spread a touch thin this month...
> >> do you see the point, james? the cost of the software > development is > >> utterly, utterly, utterly irrelevant. > > > > > > Which means that nothing we do matters to them anyway, they will > never > > listen to us, we have no reason to listen to them, and they can > basically > > piss off and stop bothering us? > > well, i'm listening. through some _really_ random and extremely > lucky - very very jammy - coincidences, i have access to some very > very large factories in china. we've been talking to them for some > time, and because of the sheer overwhelming scales that they're > dealing with, they reaaaaally like the advantages that 1) and 2) bring > to them [above, right at the top of this message]. > > mind you, it took us 18 months to explain it to them, but when we > finally managed, they were really fired up.
Link above is the video of my speech trying to explain what I think's coming (and how I hope to take advantage of it). Video and outline:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0 http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt
Only the first 30 seconds are about "what is toybox". The rest is _why_ is toybox, I.E. attempting to steer the PC to smartphone transition so we have a shot at a a non-locked-down general purpose computing device.
> and this is the opportunity that i'm acting as the gateway for *you* > - free software developers - to gain access to, to make a difference > and finally stop having to fuck around cleaning up after the mess made > by the pathological profit-maximising corporations who get up our > noses year on year.
Eh, pathological short term profit-maximizing loses out long-term to sustainable initiatives. We're not always sure what the
> > Meanwhile, we pay attention to the companies that have a future, > and not the > > modern gold rush iteration. (Before the smartphone we had the > digital watch > > boom, the calculator boom, the incomptible 8-bit microcomputer > boom, the > > dot-com pets.com/drkoop.com era... this is not a new thing, and > unix has > > lived through all of it.) > > i'll be sticking around and keeping an eye on the EOMA initiative for > the next decade, see how far it gets. that kind of long-term > commitment > > > Don't get me wrong: I'm happy to provide them with good tools. But > making > > their needs a primary design consideration when it comes to > sustainability > > and upgrade paths is wrong. > > indeed. > > >A company that lives or dies based on half a > > cent in component selection is NOT worried about an upgrade path. > It's > > making something disposable, and the company itself is disposable. > > whereas the EOMA initiative is at the complete opposite end of the > spectrum. and products based around the EOMA standards, although > there is a cost overhead of e.g. around $6 in parts for EOMA-68, there > is a whopping great saving of 30 to 40% to the customer when compared > to other products *if* your end-user is prepared to swap / share CPU > Cards between two products. if they share the CPU Card between three > products then the saving to them is even greater.
In theory, Moore's Law says that buys you... 9 months?
(At the low end I'm never quite sure where the fixed costs come to dominate. Moore's law was just about price/performance ratio, not about absolute price. We haven't gone down to disposable devices because at a certain point the battery and case cost more than the electronics...)
But as I mentioned in the video, smartphones have to be good _phones_ to tap into the billion-unit niche.
> not only that but rather than throw away an entire product just > because a CPU Card is obsolete [to them] the end-user can either > re-purpose the CPU Card in a slower product, or sell it on e-bay, or > re-use it in a freedombox.... whatever they like.
A phone is a mass-produced consumer electronics device. Is "I can rip the guts out of my DVD player and re-use it" a commercially interesting statement?
> what they *don't* have to do is put the entire product in landfill. > > etc. etc. i could go on about this at some length but i've already > done so lots of times.
Link?
> >> but the amount of time taken on software development is *not* the > >> same as the *cost* of the software development. > > > > > > And neither is the same as the quality or sustainability of the > resulting > > software. But if the product line will be be discontinued three > months after > > its introduction, who cares about being able to maintain anything? > > exactly. so in this case, with EOMA-68, even if a CPU has a 3 month > lifecycle, it's a 3 month lifecycle on *only* the CPU Card (not the > entire product range), and in that 3 months that CPU Card sold 10 > times more than if it was used in only one single-board product. > > so to a factory making EOMA-68 CPU Cards with that 3-month-lifecycle > CPU, it's still worth doing, and still worth doing well. > > so. to summarise: have i made it clear, rob, that only by doing > things like EOMA - which is basically about creating mandatory > standards with device-tree in each product's EEPROM - does device-tree > actually become *truly* useful? if not, please do say so, because > this is really important to get the message over to people.
20 years ago all the bespoke 8-bit machines were replaced by commodity PCs. Rather a lot of the bespoke embedded systems are going to be replaced by repurposed smartphone packages. But a smartphone package has to be a good phone in addition to whatever else it does, or else it won't tap into the economies of scale of this billion-unit niche.
Everything I had to say on this topic was in the ELC talk. That was on the _software_ side, not on the hardware side, but it might provide a useful framework...
Rob
P.S. Well, not _everything_. I never mentioned that Apple Airport was obviously Steve Jobs' solution to the display portion of the "smartphone as workstation" problem, I didn't hammer very hard on LLVM being primarily sponsored by Apple...
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