CherryPal/LimePC Architecture
For all you green gearheads out there interested in the CherryPal platform, here’s an interesting comment by Jack Campbell on TG Daily:
I designed this product while VP/Strategic Development for Tsinghua Tongfang. It was temporary prototype housing made in a rush to show LimePC brand products at CES 2008 — never intended for mass production. The ports are actually on the back, with the logo (for some reason) put on backwards.
For the curious, the hardware platform was engineered in cooperation with Freescale’s Austin-based R&D team in their Infotainment Division. It was never intended as a production device, but as a “superset” proof of concept system from which future devices could be derived. Also, it was never intended as a “cloud” device, instead aimed at supporting a streamlined Linux OS based load for lightweight desktop and multimedia chores.
The “CherryPal” iteration of this thing is a scraped together, low-buck abomination of what this platform could have been. I left THTF just prior to this deal coming in the door, so can only guess at the bad decisions leading to its commercialization. We had a radically unique new user interface/desktop OS version sculpted for this project, one that would have minimized the UI load on the little MPC5121e CPU, and that had a super high level of optimization work done to make the graphics/framebuffer/display subsystems use as few clock ticks as possible. None of that has emerged in the CherryPal. Instead, it carries a bog slow standard Linux build with standard desktop apps, and a browser touted as being a portal to a few server based apps. It was supposed to have a 2.5″ HDD, not NAND flash for storage… oh well.
Weird, pointless, and sad. This project had such a higher level set of goals. What you are seeing is a crippled, 30% version of what the original LimePC project was intended to deliver.
I disagree that the project was pointless – and I hope that CherryPal, LimePC, or something similar can get off the ground by some savvy company.
