I am happy to do an xscale board but not at $120 per cpu, plus i prefer the intel 2700G as its a much more capable chip and easier to interface to as well as bieng well documented with publicly avalible infomation
but i have a feeling that this chip is in a class in terms of performance, the inbuilt vide (dual head), Open GL support (not the cut/enhanced down ES), MPEG4 encoding and decoding acceleration with post and pre filtering (such as deringing which is very cpu intensive) and floating point all coupled with a high performance bus (the xscales performance is rapidly reduced on IO and mem tasks) and ddr 266
so basically this 1 chip multimedia wise should blow the 2 chip soulution out of the water in terms of cost and performance, BUT i dont have any numbers to support that, i am going on the technical details i am reading in the referenc manual of both, beta player benchmarks, technical analisys of the xscales performance for difrent tasks and gut feeling.
i dont want to sound stuck up but those are what ihave bassed my desicion on, the price and avalibility being huge points.
speculatrix: for the audio stuff it has been discussed already and we came to the same conclusion to use a breakout box, i might be able to route spdif out oh one of the headphone jacks but only if i can place the spidf in a high impedence state (effctivly turning it off), were you asking for spdif in or out or both or both at the same time because if we have 2 headphone jacks we could have one for in and the other for out
both jacks will be 4 ring and will be left, right, microphone input/3rd sound output, gnd as there is only 2 adc's on the chip, i might change it to allow you to have it setup up as 3 outputs or 2 outputs and 1 input where the input can be taken from any ring bar gnd
those pics are nice but the way i look at it that would be a medium density desin (the mother board that is), i mention that because there are alot of people who dont think we have alot of space, if you have seen a HTC phone design then you will knom the density i am talking about
back to the main topic, bluetooth i think would be best on the full speed usb port as that port is effectivly useless in my mind (not enough speed for 802.11g) so connection of that is easy, wifi i havent decided how to connect it, US would be ince but some people want 2 usb ports on the back, mast of the chips are usb or pci so it looks like 1 usb port (use a hub) but i need examples of chips with linux drivers to make an informed descision, it seems the Z**** (cant remeber exactly ) is supported as albeter is using one so mabey thats the chip to use