[Olpc-open] next gen XO + coprocessor?

[Denver Gingerich]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 10:40 AM, John Kintree <jkintree at swbell.net> wrote:
> With the XO laptop, the quality of the video that goes straight
>  from the camera to the screen is pretty good, but the quality
>  of video that is recorded with the Record activity, saved, and
>  then played from storage is not nearly as good.  Perhaps a
>  coprocessor could help improve that video quality.
>
>  In March of 2005, Andrey Filippov reported that he had used a
>  Xilinx FPGA with theora to design a network camera that
>  could compress the image from a 1280x1024 sensor in
>  real-time at 30 fps.
>  http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3888835064.html

You may wish to post this on the Gen2 CPU Ideas wiki page
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Gen2_CPU_Ideas).  I did some brief searches
for "gen2" and "2nd generation" on the wiki and Gen2 CPU Ideas seems
to be the closest page to match that.  Perhaps others on this list
know of a more general page that talks more generally about the Gen2
hardware (not just CPU).

I suspect that other, less invasive changes to Gen2 will help improve
saved video quality, such as better write speed to the built-in flash
(current speeds are fairly poor from what I hear), so a dedicated
hardware solution may not be necessary.

Denver