Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 301 from 2003/2/24
From: Genesi
This is NOT official Genesi or bPlan word :)
"Great deals with ATI" are nothing to do with driver support. You just need to buy lots and lots and lots of chips.
Pricing on the MOBILITY 9200 is around the same as the 7000 chip used in the A1-Lite - so that pretty much secures that :)
For a laptop it would be intriguing, due to the lack of need for a pluggable processor, to design a board which used a System on Chip rather than a "desktop" processor. Freescale (8520) offer lots of choices with integrated DDR controllers, gigabit ethernet etc. All you need on top of that in the basic other ports - a PCI USB controller (NEC is a good bet), a PCI Firewire controller (Via VT6306), a PCI SerialATA controller (Marvell or Promise) and a Cardbus controller (everyone uses Texas Instruments..) you get the picture. No need for an integrated southbridge since the CPU contains all the peripheral buses etc.
Once PCI-Express comes along it reduces the size of boards significantly due to the serial bus. Also this would be implementable;
http://www.expresscard.org/
The more likely process is to create a small low-profile totally integrated board (much smaller than mini-ITX or nano-ITX) with LVDS port, which just-so-happens to be able to fit into a laptop-style chassis with a commonly available LCD panel. Or a tablet chassis. Or in a kiosk. Or in a car..
I wouldn't count on a specific Genesi laptop since it requires designing elaborate cooling solutions, casing (both mechanical and artistic design) and so on. bPlan are a hardware shop, not an arthouse.
Neko
Matt Sealey, Genesi USA, Inc.
Developer Relations
Product Development Analyst