Hey,
On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 01:54:59PM +0200, Thomas Buschhardt wrote:
It is quite likely that the different sample BIOS images from the vendors are different, even if for the same hardware.
Of course they differ, but if I read 1 chip 3 times and compare the bin's - they differ too :-(
Ouch. Do they differ a lot? Can you run xxd on them and then diff?
Bit errors indeed start showing when the chip has been through (quite) a few erase/rewrite cycles. I had not heard about that write protection idea before.
Can you get a few other flash chips for further testing?
Today I telephone with the Galep producer and he said - some chip vendors use a "writeprotection technic" that u cant use the free samples to burn your own image on it. I order some new (clean ;-)) chips. I understand these method, because one of these vendor (www.insydesw.com) offer 50 chips for free - its quite a lot of money (1 chip is about 5.90 EUR).
If you are a company and have a budget for more than just a few chips you can usually get a decent deal for 30 chips (one tube) from the local component distributors.
Price goes down a lot when quantity goes up, so I doubt Insyde is paying very much.. :)
//Peter