First post, by cyclone3d
- Rank
- l33t++
Finally am getting around to messing with this fancy eval board.
The SOC is a ST Microelectronics STPC Consumer-II x86 chip that is specced to run at up to 133Mhz.
Supposedly is is "5th gen x86" according to ST, but it doesn't look like it supports anything Pentium-wise although I did find reference to it supporting some of the extra stuff that the Cyrix 5x86 supports.
It supports up to 128MB SDRAM at 100Mhz. The SDRAM/onboard video clock can be configured from 45Mhz to 100Mhz within the BIOS although I am unsure if it actually adjusts the SDRAM clock or not. Testing will tell.
If using a single 128MB stick, it has to be double sided to work properly.
The RAM used for the video can be up to 4MB and the onboard video can also be disabled.
The mouting holes are standard ATX so no problems mounting it in a case which is very helpful.
Rear I/O has:
s-video, composite, and VGA out
composite video in
serial
PS/2 keyboard and mouse
The plug on the side of the board is SCART which I will never use.
Looks like PCI clock can be set up to 1/2 the bus speed, so 50Mhz max IF there are no undocumented jumper settings that go over 100Mhz bus speed.
I will be testing the switches that have to do with the bus speed as there are a lot of undocumented switch position settings.
One strange thing I noticed is that the datasheet says that you only have 2 different options for running the CPU at 133Mhz.
66Mhz HCLK /MCLK with the 2x multiplier and 66Mhz HCLK /100Mhz MCLK with the 2x multiplier.
When I received the board, it was set to 100Mhz HCLK with the 2x multiplier. It booted up just fine. I am wondering if this thing works at 200Mhz. That would be a treat.
Edit: I was looking at it wrong. It was running at 1x so 100Mhz HCLK and 100Mhz CPU. /edit
I was able to find the drivers through a lot of searching and grabbing them out of a driver package from an SBC that uses the same SOC.
Only thing it needs other than the default windows drivers are video drivers and drivers for the floppy controller.
Here is the datasheet and reference schematics:
I will have to upload the programming manual and link it as it is too large to attach here.
