Under the Spousal Radar!
I attended the first day of the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose today. Previous conferences have included hands on tracks, and this year continues that theme. This conference’s track is called Build Your Own Embedded System (BYOSE) and uses the Beagle Board from Texas Instruments.
I picked up my Beagle Board at registration and headed off to the Beagle Board 101 class taught by Jason Kridner and Gerald Coley from TI. At least 120 engineers connected their boards into screens, keyboards, mice, and USB hubs, and shortly we were all running a basic Linux distribution.
TI describes the $149 price point and 3” by 3” size as “under the spousal radar”. True enough, although unfortunately it seems to have been easily detected by all my kids’ radars. They haven’t ratted me out yet, but it’s costing me. TI’s recommendations- if you’ve got less money but more time- this board is for you. If you have more money but less time, go with one of TI’s evaluation boards and a commercial Linux distribution.
The centerpiece of the board is TI’s OMAP 3430. It includes an ARM Cortex A8 application processor, an Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX graphics accelerator, and a TI C64x DSP with a number of specialized accelerators. This is a great example of a highly integrated asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) system. Developing applications for the ARM A8 is fairly straightforward using the GNU toolchain. With a little more work, the developer can gain access to the graphics engine and the DSP subsystem.
TI OMAP 3430
What most interests me is how this platform lets a programmer evaluate processing tradeoffs between the different processing engines and accelerators, including running and coordinating their parallel activities- something we all will be doing much more off in the future. One of the big things we do at CriticalBlue, with products like Prism and Cascade, is help engineers efficiently and easily evaluate these tradeoffs. The Beagle Board appears to be a very practical proving ground for different application design and programming approaches.
The best place to get started- beagleboard.org. It contains a wealth of information, an active community, and quite a few interesting projects.
TI recently announced the OMAP4 architecture which, among other enhancements, ups the application processor to a dual core Cortex A9MPCore- adding true symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) to the mix. When the time comes, I certainly hope TI offers a Beagleboard equivalent, but maybe by then they can figure out how to keep these multiprocessing boards under even my kids’ radars.