Thread: JollaMobile : Jolla continues Nokia's excellent work on #MeeGo based smartphones
View Single Post
Fuzzillogic is offline Fuzzillogic
2012-07-17 , 16:03
Posts: 479 | Thanked: 1,284 times | Joined on Jan 2012 @ Enschede, The Netherlands
#750
Originally Posted by shmerl View Post
Bootloader in ROM is bad for usability, since you can't install any custom OS, can't boot from external storage and etc.
Sure it can. This bootstrapper has 2 functions: be the ultimate and indestructible fall-back for flashing a firmware. And that can be any firmware you want - even the ones that don't work at all . But, if there's no USB connection or something it simply (tries to) start the real bootloader of the firmware.

The mainboard I bought in 1995 had just that: 2KiB of ROM, which was activated by a jumper or key or something and could flash the firmware from a diskette. There was no other interface than that. The videocard wasn't even initialized. Yet that was enough to recover from even a totally zero'd flash RAM. Truly fail-save. And that's what I expect from a phone.

Originally Posted by mikecomputing View Post
again medfield has not been tested on a mobileplatform and is a heavy risk for a small player success with an untested cpu.

also I dont want to have 35 year bloated architecture on my devices.
Does it really matter? The first thing current x86 (all of them) do is translate the x86 code into RISC-like microcode. And apparently it doesn't harm absolute performance nor performance/watt by an order of magnitude or more compared to ARM / MIPS / what have you. Sure, ARM might "scale" better to the very low power end of the spectrum, but that's not what we have in our phones.