[Empeg-general] Re: RAM

[Hugo Fiennes]

Board space is the main constraint currently, yes. We have a large number of 16Mbit EDO chips which we're using at the moment. 12Mb is 6 chips, which is a large amount of area. Going to double-sided assembly is very expensive, so everything has to stay on one side. The next move will be to a CPU capable of SDRAM support, but this won't be for a while yet - at that point, we'll probably go to 16Mb. 32Mb is possible, but pointless for the vast majority of users (they'd never notice the difference) - DIMM support isn't really very practical due to many constraints including capacitive loading of the bus (ie, we'd need to fit bus buffers, etc).

Our flash has 100,000 erase cycles minimum. We only write to this on power down, not on track skip, so you're looking at 100,000 power cycles which is a *long* time... playlist info is written to disk. The flash does both kernel/ramdisk storage and parameter storage (/dev/empeg_state - current track & timecode in playlist, volume, etc).

Bigger drives: when we can get them easily, and guarantee supply, we will offer them. At the moment we can get samples but not supply. No idea on when we'll be able to get them properly as dates given by IBM have little relation to calendar-time :)

Hugo