> good to see they have removed this tri-core nonsense from the description of the C120.

They didn't:

"The Freescale power architecture triple-core 5121e processor provides a fantastic Internet browsing and multimedia user experience."
http://www.cherrypal.com/products.php

"The Freescale power architecture triple-core 5121e processor provides a pleasant Internet browsing and multimedia user experience."
http://www.cherrypal.com/secure/product_info.php?products_id=1

I've just been bored enough to watch(*) Seybold's talk he gave at Standford University in early June (blog entry, abstract, slides), and guess what he states at 24:38 in respect to the processor of the C114/C120 ;-)
(Btw, there appears some new product coming, a sub-$300 tablet computer called "America". See page 11 in the slides, or at 37:30 in the video stream, or there.)

(*) stream URL: mms://lang.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/100602/100602-ee380-500.wmv

Edit: Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-paFEBAjHPo

> "techcentral.co.za" article who were the ones that actually tested the Linkbook,
> with mixed feelings

Another review article:
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/reviews/13724-Linkbook-review.html

Discussions of the Linkbook:
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/230669-Linkbook-from-Vodacom-arrives
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/249890-Vodacom-Linkbook-review
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/259369-Linkbook-giveaway-Enter-now

Interesting posting from one of those threads:

"I was thinking of getting one of these for each of my nieces. They're under 8 years old, and do not need data, so I wanted just the LinkBook, vc can keep their data. So I phoned up the local Vodashop and asked them. Yes, you can buy it cash, for R 3276"

So it seems the Linkbook is also available without Vodacom contract for 3276 R (which is about 340 EUR at the moment).

Linkbook "hacks":
http://blog.hexdream.za.net/2010/08/vodacom-linkbook-hacks/


Edit: Another thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1602866

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/10/22 12:19 ]

> Wonder what Max Seybold will do next time.

"I have decided to step down as CEO of Cherrypal and handed over the keys to John Collier who is now responsible for the day-to-day operations."
http://www.cherrypal.com/GreenOpenFair/2010/10/05/edwinfoundation/

Apparently, Seybold is now the CTO.

Amazing research, as always Andreas. You are dedicating a lot of time to this, perhaps more than it deserves...

But the fact is that the Linkbook does exist indeed, as that "hacks" link you provide testifies. It's a great read, by the way. Also, it seems some people are actually quite happy with it. What a pity it has never reached outside small markets.

> it has never reached outside small markets.

East Asia is damn big don't you think? ;-) We just don't know how widespread it is there.

Update:

>> good to see they have removed this tri-core nonsense from the
>> description of the C120.

> They didn't:
>
> "The Freescale power architecture triple-core 5121e processor provides a
> fantastic Internet browsing and multimedia user experience."
> http://www.cherrypal.com/products.php
>
> "The Freescale power architecture triple-core 5121e processor provides a
> pleasant Internet browsing and multimedia user experience."
> http://www.cherrypal.com/secure/product_info.php?products_id=1

Now they've added even another funny claim to the "triple-core" nonsense. The line "access to the Green Maraschiono Cloud (optional)" has been replaced by "Designed in Palo Alto, manufactured in Asia" in their new partner store.

> there appears some new product coming, a sub-$300 tablet computer called "America".

It's even sub-$200:

http://www.cherrypal.com/home.htm
http://www.prlog.org/10983212-cherrypal-launches-powerful-7-inch-188-android-21-3d-tablet-computer-for-the-sub-ipad-market.html

Video presentations by Max Seybold:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5sxS-muxjQ ("800 GHz processor" ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3kSQSL41C0

Unboxing video:
http://www.vimeo.com/16302600 (interesting: "Model number: S1003" at 3:15)

Reviews:
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/CherryPad-7Inch-Android-Tablet-Video-Review/
http://blog.laptopmag.com/cherrypal-cherrypad-america-hands-on-an-188-android-tablet-that-works
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371640,00.asp (very brief)
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/tablets/cherrypal-cherrypad.aspx
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372225,00.asp

Edit: Added another video URL.
Edit2: Added some more links.
Edit3: Added another review.
Edit4: Added PCMag review.

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/10/19 23:43 ]
[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/10/30 16:16 ]
[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/11/4 18:20 ]
[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/11/10 0:31 ]

Quote:

Watching it right now. Quite boring, which is very adequate for a consumer product: It works. The browsing experience was kind of depressing, with those very nineties like "mobile version" web sites. In all, it's like my brief experience with demo iPads at stores: It simply bores me, it can't do anything new or interesting.

But anyway, hey, it works, it seems to do everything the iPad does, only with less bells and wistles... and expense. Oh, shit, it has even reached mainstream, influential web sites...

Which led me to this phylosophical controversy: Why on earth are people so excited about tablets, that just do a subset of the things we've been doing since ages on our regular computers? How clever is a population that gets impressed by a form factor alone?

And a second thought: MorphOS Team, for god's sake, go ARM! There's such an amount of people, with orders of magnitude LESS talent than you, doing it...

You might say, this guy first said "go x86", and now this... Right, but just imagine the inevitable competition with a certain very popular operating system on x86. Now think how well MorphOS would compete against the kind of operating systems running on these ARM based toys. We ARE competitive! No one would repeat the sick "bah, MorphOS, it doesn't run office". I bet we meet ALL the requirements people expect from tablets...

...only faster. WAY faster. And cooler. Immensely cooler.

> very adequate for a consumer product: It works.

To be sure of what anyone who knows Cherrypal's history knows anyway I did some search for the "Cherrypal developed" CherryPad America's looks and specs and found this:

http://www.touchscreendirect.co.uk/0001-560800-B0043LVKDI-DWM_R703_Tablet_PC_with_7_Inch_LCDAndroid_211280768_Pixels_Resolution.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/DWM-R703-Tablet-Android-Pixels-Resolution/dp/B0043LVKDI

...with the difference that it's said to have a Telechips processor instead of the CherryPad's alleged Samsung processor.

> The browsing experience was kind of depressing, with those very nineties like
> "mobile version" web sites.

The reason for this is that Android runs on smaller screen cell phones usually and only just recently also on the bigger screen tablet PCs. The web servers are detecting the client's Android system but can't tell a cell phone from a tablet PC obviously and thus change to the mobile version of the website for either device. To circumvent this the website would have to check the client's screen resolution via JavaScript for example and decide based on that.

> it has even reached mainstream, influential web sites

Didn't each and every Cherrypal product reach that site to date?

Edit:
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/10/08/cherrypal-start-their-scams-again-this-time-with-an-android-tablet/

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/10/14 23:29 ]

Perfectly nailed again, Andreas. For sure, Cherrypal is merely reselling that "DWM R703" product someone else made.

Pity you said nothing about my MorphOS on ARM drivel...

> Perfectly nailed

Unfortunately not. I overlooked the screen resolution. While the DWM-R703 can do 1024x768 according to the specs listing, the CherryPad can do only 800x480 (i.e. only about half the amount of pixels) according to Cherrypal. But from the looks of it they seem identical:

(1) http://www.cherrypal.com/images/CherryPad_4x3.jpg
(2) http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FCpZ0-4RL.jpg

Maybe the CherryPad is just a more recent revision of the DWM-R703 ;-)

> Cherrypal is merely reselling that "DWM R703" product someone else made.

It may not be that DWM-R703 they're reselling, but they're reselling an externally developed product. That's for sure, yes.

> Pity you said nothing about my MorphOS on ARM drivel...

I'm still not sure about the true big-endian capabilities of current ARM processors.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6268&forum=11&post_id=62857#62857

Quote:

But I thought that endianess is only an issue when exchanging data with peripherals, thus a driver only issue, and drivers have to be rewritten anyway... Nevermind, I think I'll never understand completely the endianess issues. It's one of those concepts that, no matter how many times explained, I never graps completely. Do you have such concepts too?

> I thought that endianess is only an issue when exchanging data with
> peripherals, thus a driver only issue

I was (implicitely) referring to the backwards compatibility issue, i.e. running existing m68k (and even PPC?) code transparently on MorphOS/ARM, the same way existing m68k code is transparently running on MorphOS/PPC right now. Such would require an ARM (or any other) CPU to have true big-endian capability.

It is primarily for backward compability, but also some code (e.g. Hooks) must get adapted to compile correctly under a different endianess than it was originally intended for.
For backward compability (68k and ppc) I think it can be concentrated to the following question: what happens if some program calls 0x00000004, does it get Exec base or does it not? If not it will probably crash.

Addendum:

> I'm still not sure about the true big-endian capabilities of current ARM processors.

Olaf "Olsen" Barthel seems to be rather optimistic about it:

"AmigaOS [...] is hardwired to a big-endian host platform, not just the fundamentals but also its data structures. I would say that the chances to see AmigaOS run on an ARM are much higher than to see it run on an x86 family processor."
http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwbarthel_en.php

Edit: Some more from him:

"the sacrifices that would have to be made to get AmigaOS working on the x86 platform would be greater than by comparison with the ARM, because you can have it load/store data from/to memory in either big endian or little endian fashion, depending upon how the chip is configured."
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5678#76241

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/10/14 3:28 ]

Addendum:

>> I'm still not sure about the true big-endian capabilities of current ARM processors.

> Olaf "Olsen" Barthel seems to be rather optimistic about it [...]

Nicholas "minator" Blachford, who works for ARM Ltd., is on the same track, at least regarding ARMv7-A:

"How well will it do on a 2.5GHz A9 in big endian mode?"
http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbmessage.pl/amiga/179223.shtml

Wonderful quotes as always, Andreas. Particularly, that moobunny post by Nicholas is devastating.

I'd like t point out that theres much variety in ARM processors, being several instruction sets, superscalar and not, etc. Perhaps some obvious literature here would help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARM_cores

Too many candies in the box, I'd say. So, it's not that easy as "port it to ARM". That "ARM" is a very, very broad thing. Not to talk about on-die peripherals that chip makers add on their own...

> Too many candies in the box, I'd say. So, it's not that easy as
> "port it to ARM". That "ARM" is a very, very broad thing.

I think it's not too complicated really. The only current ARM architecture that would be reasonable for MorphOS is ARMv7-A. There you have ARM's own implementation Cortex-A (with A8 and A9 (and soon A15)) as well as architecture licensees' implementations like Qualcomm's Scorpion and Marvell's Sheeva PJ4.

Quote:

Yes, the "cortex" bunch. Those are superscalar, Quite some favourites are there (OMAPs, Snapdragons...).

Quote:

My brother, who has experience building computerrs with ARM processors (the humble ones, I'd add), told me that Marvell's original offerings were not strictly ARM cores, but something that they bought from Intel (XScale) that happens to be compatible, although it's not an ARM license. He also told me how hard is working with Marvell, they have zero interest in small parties, and hide documentation. In the end, he had to go for a cheap and accesible Samsung chip.

> Yes, the "cortex" bunch.

Yes, but not all of them. Cortex-M and Cortex-R are not ARMv7-A. Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M1 are not even ARMv7 but ARMv6. That's why I specifically said Cortex-A.

> Those are superscalar

Yes, Cortex-A is. The other Cortex cores are not.

> Quite some favourites are there ([...] Snapdragons...).

Wikipedia is wrong there. Snapdragon uses the Scorpion core (mentioned in posting before), which is *not* an ARM Cortex but Qualcomm's own ARMv7-A implementation.

> My brother [...] told me that Marvell's original offerings were not strictly ARM cores,
> but something that they bought from Intel (XScale) that happens to be compatible,
> although it's not an ARM license.

That sounds a little confused ;-) First and foremost you have to understand the difference between licensing an ARM ISA version and licensing an actual ARM core (which implements a certain ARM ISA version). Marvell had been an ARMv5 ISA licensee even before they got XScale from Intel. That was when they had their Feroceon line of CPUs which they got together with the ARM ISA license by acquiring the company Asica in 2003. Later in 2006, they got another ARMv5 ISA implementation in the form of XScale. They merged Feroceon and XScale into the Sheeva PJ1 core, still implementing ARMv5 ISA of course. Then, Marvell licensed the ARMv6/v7 ISA and implemented their Sheeva PJ4 core from that.
In that sense, Marvell never had "strictly ARM cores" to offer. All their ARM cores to date have been own implementations of some licensed ARM ISA version, not actual cores licensed from ARM Ltd. But on the other hand, that'd be like saying that the PA6T is not "strictly Power Architecture core" because P.A.Semi created that from an architectural license as opposed to licensing an actual Power Architecture core from IBM like Applied Micro, LSI and others have done.
Like I said, the only ARMv7-A implementations I'm aware of right now are ARM Ltd's Cortex-A, Qualcomm's Scorpion and Marvell's Sheeva PJ4. If anyone knows some more I'd be glad to know :-)

Quote:

Hummm... Probably. Perhaps I remembered my brother's stories badly. I've asked him to check your answer, to see where I was wrong.

So this Ti OMAP? 4 based system might work?

http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/pandaboard/39158/

How do we find out if a particular ARM processor can use big endeia addressing?

> So this Ti OMAP? 4 based system might work?

According to Olsen and minator, yes.

> How do we find out if a particular ARM processor can use big endeia addressing?

*True* big endian addressing is of relevance here. Other than that I'd like to have this question answered myself :-)

OK, that's a fair answer.

I'm not 100% convince by jcmarcos and others pointing to ARM. It just that the pricing of the hardware does make it attractive.

ARM doesn't look fast enough to handle PPC code via JIT emulation though. That would leave us with the other (less palatable) idea of having a version of MorphOS that require recompilation of program code for existing programs.

Then there's ARM @ 1Ghz vs. PPC @2Ghz and abiove to consider.

Update:

> I did some search for the "Cherrypal developed" CherryPad America's looks
> and specs and found this: [...] ...with the difference that it's said to have a
> Telechips processor instead of the CherryPad's alleged Samsung processor.

Surprise, surprise. The CherryPad's alleged Samsung processor turned into a Telechips processor by pure magic:

"Processor: Telechips ARM11 800 MHz (CPU + GPU + DSP) system-on-chip"
http://www.cherrypal.com/c515.htm

"CherryPad is powered by the fast Telechip ARM11 processor (CPU + GPU + DSP, OpenGL 2.0) 800 MHz processor"
http://www.cherrypal.com/secure/product_info.php?products_id=16

This fact combined with the "slipped" original model number led me to this:

http://www.cadof.com/item/7965696188.html (Google translation, 908 yuan is about 137 USD at the moment)
http://www.uupad.cn/thread-3108-1-1.html (Google translation)

Great looking vaporware, Andreas. A 7 inch Android tablet, cheap? Sign me up! If one ever appears.

Do we have confirmation that Cherrypal has shipped anything?