Merging Allwinner support

let's look at what the goals of the rhombus tech project are, and then you begin to appreciate where the EOMA68 standard is coming from. the mission is:

" to create modular environmentally-conscious mass-volume products that are long-term upgradeable by the end user "

now let's see if Q-Seven fits that goal.

Q) Can a Q-Seven module be installed by the average end-user without any harm or damage?
A) No it cannot.

- Firstly it has "optional interfaces" making it impossible for the average end-user to work out what they should be doing.
- Secondly it has bare contacts which mean that the average 8-year-old or the average 80-year-old is never going to understand or care about anti-static precautions.

Q) Can a Q-Seven module fit safely (or at all) into a wallet?
A) No it cannot.

Modules conforming to the Q-Seven Standard are designed to be factory-installed by qualified engineers.

Q) Can a Q-Seven module be installed, removed and reinstalled 20,000 times?
A) No it cannot.

by contrast PCMCIA (which EOMA68 re-uses) has an extremely large insertion and removal cycle run. MXM connectors typically have an insertion lifetime of 25 cycles (or whatever it is, it's extremely low).

does this start to give you some idea of what the differences are, and why Q-Seven is neither a competitor to EOMA68 nor can it even be under consideration as the basis for a mass-volume modular appliance standard?

> all interfaces non-optional (the existence of incompatible boards seems to have
> been considered a problem).

mmm... kinda :) ok, let's imagine that you are an average person. you've bought a tablet
and you've bought {INSERT VENDOR CPU CARD HERE}. it has "optional SATA" which you don't
care about, because you have a tablet.

now you go out and buy a laptop. it has a SATA HDD. but the CPU Card that you bought
doesn't WORK with SATA because SATA is quotes optional quotes on the Standard and the
CPU Card you bought doesn't HAVE a SATA interface.

now you think "okay, so i could make that USB, right? the base units could have, optionally,
a USB-to-SATA converter, right?"

but now you've made matters even worse: you now have *two* possible routes by which SATA
could be provided: one is via USB-to-SATA (optional) and the other is (optional) SATA on the
CPU Card... how on earth do you route those through to a single SATA HDD??

so it is infinitely simpler just to say "these are the interfaces that MUST be provided, and
that's the end of the discussion". and the benefits are that, as a "Sales Pitch", the average
salesman can say "Just Buy Anything In This Range: It Will Work".

now, here's where we have to get honest :) by "non-optional" we actually mean that each
"non-optional" interface can have *HARDWARE*-level speed negotiation, *including*
negotiating the use of extra pins... *IF* available.

so, for example, there is Micro-SD now on the latest version of EOMA68. Micro-SD can have
1, 2 or 4 pins, and there is also speed negotiation that can take place (at the hardware as
well as at the OS level).

so let's imagine that a CPU Card has support for only 2 I/O pins. you plug that CPU Card into
a device that has 4 I/O pins: *AUTOMATICALLY* you get only 2 of those pins connected... but
that's okay because the SD/MMC Standard allows I/O to be either 1, 2 or 4 pins.

likewise for Gigabit Ethernet, you can either use 4 wires (10/100) or, if the other 4 are
connected (either at the CPU Card or on the Base Unit), you can get Gigabit Ethernet.

likewise for USB3, USB3 *already* has hardware backwards-compatibility down to USB2
because if either the CPU Card or the Base Unit do not have the USB3 wires they will at
the very least have the USB2 wires.

so we say "non-optional" but there is a lot of wiggle-room to cover SoCs all the way
from a $2 ultra-low-cost QFP chip, right the way up to a $40 quad or octal core monster.

so the HONEST salesman will, out of the corner of his mouth and in a sotto voice,
tell you that you "get what you pay for", in other words "yeah it'll work, but you're
better off sunny-jim paying for the faster CPU Card because it has faster hardware
and you'll be able to do more".

and the nice thing is that the honest salesman will, in a year or two's time, get more
repeat business because in a year or two's time that "average person" will come back
and ask him for a faster CPU Card.

and that average person will be happy because instead of having to throw away the
entire product as land-fill they will only need to spend a fraction of the cost of a
"monolithic" unit buying the latest-and-greatest fastest CPU Card...