An upgrade on the OPII board ?

[Alezis]

Hey everyone,
 
We got called last october on a job to fix an OPII that was defective, actually got a lightning hit not too far from the house that blew the ethernet port and phone line... 
 
just wanted to know that if you guys noticed the new updated flash board on on top of the new OPII boards ? What is that all about ? More storage space ? Is there something coming up in the near future for the OPII ??
 
It's the first time I saw this little board installed on a OPII back in october 2017 !
 
 

 

[kwschumm]

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it's because the original flash chips are NLA.

 

[Alezis]

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it's because the original flash chips are NLA.

 
you might be right... I find that odd though that you can still find and buy a super cheap CPU that is still used on the OPII but the SMT flash chip that are way more recent than the old flash chip that were in the old sockets wouldn't ?

 

[kwschumm]

you might be right... I find that odd though that you can still find and buy a super cheap CPU that is still used on the OPII but the SMT flash chip that are way more recent than the old flash chip that were in the old sockets wouldn't ?

 
Old CPUs are everywhere. They were in tons of products over decades. They used to be state of the art but now they are a really cheap way to put some intelligence in a simple product. Your keyboard for example - how much CPU is really required to scan the keyboard? But the job needs doing. They are often licensed by small manufacturers and can be manufactured in old fabs. They are easily cloned. New CPUs using old CPU designs are sometimes made with newish fab technology to achieve a smaller form factor, lower power consumption, and modern packaging.
 
Flash technology is moving very fast. A given model number has a lifespan of maybe a year. It's not like a LOT of companies will design in a specific flash chip, there is lots of competition. As technology gets denser the price per unit of storage drops a lot. Flash parts are a definite commodity and an upgrade is usually not very much work. The OPII add-on board was probably not a big effort. It could be that the flash part used is much larger than the CPU can address, depending on how it is mapped in. I've seen 4k *bytes* of flash used in a 1 mbit flash chip simply because the smaller chips were either not available or cost more.

 

[Alezis]

Old CPUs are everywhere. They were in tons of products over decades. They used to be state of the art but now they are a really cheap way to put some intelligence in a simple product. Your keyboard for example - how much CPU is really required to scan the keyboard? But the job needs doing. They are often licensed by small manufacturers and can be manufactured in old fabs. They are easily cloned. New CPUs using old CPU designs are sometimes made with newish fab technology to achieve a smaller form factor, lower power consumption, and modern packaging.
 
Flash technology is moving very fast. A given model number has a lifespan of maybe a year. It's not like a LOT of companies will design in a specific flash chip, there is lots of competition. As technology gets denser the price per unit of storage drops a lot. Flash parts are a definite commodity and an upgrade is usually not very much work. The OPII add-on board was probably not a big effort. It could be that the flash part used is much larger than the CPU can address, depending on how it is mapped in. I've seen 4k *bytes* of flash used in a 1 mbit flash chip simply because the smaller chips were either not available or cost more.

 
oh... ok... I thought Leviton was really working on upgrading the OPII... I got a false hope I guess...
 
thanks for sharing !