KOSH [Kommunity Orientated Software Hardware] Weekly Summary Week: 24th May, 1999 Number: 015 Mailing List: kosh-hardware-o In the mailing list this week, the following items were discussed. Please do not email the scribe regarding any of these topics, it is not his job to answer these questions, but merely to report the topics of conversation. If you have any queries about this summary, please email summaries@kosh.convergence.org, stating the Summary Number, and Mailing List Name and he will try to answer your queries. a) Subject: Windows 9x loses mulitasking when using floppy drive? Summary of Debate: Windows 9x has been observed to behave very slugishly when using the floppy drive. This may be because the drivers use the PC BIOS, which is 16 bit code and requires windows to turn of multitasking while it's in use. b) Subject: What determines the bit size of a system (16, 32, 64..) Summary of Debate: There are several possible ways to measure this. One is to measure the actual size of the registers in the CPU, though this is not always uniform. Another is to measure the width of the data bus. The most common is to measure the software programming model used with the system. c) Subject: Loading drivers from the network. Summary of Debate: The fact that USB devices can load their drivers dynamically fits well with the Kosh plan of making device drivers available on servers on either an intranet or the internet. For devices without drivers, requests could be sent with the devices built-in device id and vendor id requesting the appropriate driver. It was mentioned that these requests would be a good way to keep track of what devices were popular but didn't have Kosh drivers yet. Of course this would be all configurable, for folks that don't want Kosh knowing anything about their hardware, etc... d) Subject: Field Programmable Gate Arrays assisting CPU's Summary of Debate: It was suggested that it might be interesting to put one or more FPGA's onto the bus, with the intention of loading them with specific routines that could be used to assist the CPU, such as rendering, encryption, decoding. These routines would be designed by a team of engineers, possibly using software to synthesize a Hardware Description Language design into a FPGA. Xilinx were mentioned because they employ SRAM rather than flash memory, as flash would wear out as new routines were continually loaded onto the FPGA. The Altera Flex FPGA's were also mentioned as they are used to develop the ARC and TDMI's ARM CPUs, and can be found in a Nintendo 64 add on. Major concerns were that these FPGA's would run too slowly to be useful, and that they would be too expensive. It was mentioned that the FPGA market is very competetive and the FPGA makers are giving away more development modules.