ev3 and cosmo2

By Chris Pirazzi. Many thanks to the holders of the sacred knowledge: Greg Poist, Grant Dorman, and Micheal Minakami.

This document describes the ev3 boards:

and the cosmo2 boards:

Taxonomy of the ev3's

Ev3 is our name for a set of boards which identify themselves in the vl as "impact." As we will see later, cosmo2s also identify themselves in the VL as "impact." The ev3 boards all use the underlying design known as "Galileo 1.5" or "Impact Video." This blurb explains exactly which boards this is, and their differences. What happened to ev2? Don't ask, you will only regret it.

Why ev3? We at the Lurker's Guide have invented the name ev3. This name makes no historical sense whatsoever, and in fact annoys the relevant hardware engineers, since the boards we are calling ev3 represent an entirely new, superior design over all ev1 boards. You might think that a more logical choice would be "impact." However, because of several marketing decisions, this name only leads to confusion and must be qualified or avoided in any intelligible summary of hardware boards:

Therefore we politely apologize to the hardware engineers and we thank SGI Marketing for providing us with a shining and amusing example of how not to name products!

The ev3 boards all have these properties:

Currently, there are two ev3s:

Indigo2 Box:

  1. Impact Video For Indigo2

Note: "Impact Video for Indigo2" is a different product from "Indigo2Video for Impact.". The latter is an ev1-based product ("Express Video" and "Galileo 1.0" are other names for ev1), a completely different design.

Octane Box:

  1. Octane Digital Video

Taxonomy of the cosmo2's

Cosmo2 is our name for all boards under the name "Impact Compression." These boards all use the underlying design known as "Cosmo 2.0."

These boards have analog video input and output jacks, and they also have video compression hardware. Like the ev3s, the cosmo2s identify themselves in the VL as "impact" (more on that later).

Cosmo2 boards are superior to cosmo1 boards in several ways. You can use a cosmo2 board with or without an ev3 board. Cosmo2 boards have analog input and output jacks of their own (note that the ev3s are all-digital solutions), which can be used of sources and sinks of YCrCb or RGB uncompressed video data using the VL. Cosmo2 boards allow you to create video->compression->memory and memory->compression->video paths as you could do with cosmo1. The "video" nodes in these paths can be one of cosmo2's jacks, or one of the digital video jacks on a connected ev3. Cosmo2 boards can do 2:1 compression at full rate (cosmo1 could only do 4:1). You can run two simultaneous paths involving video and memory (with or without compression).

An especially interesting fact about cosmo2 is that you can create a single memory->compression->memory path that will operate at full rate.

The cosmo2 boards all have these properties:

Currently there are two cosmo2s:

Indigo2 Box:

  1. Impact Compression For Indigo2

Octane Box:

  1. Octane Compression

ev3 and cosmo2 are both "impact" to the VL

An indigo2 system can contain no boards, a cosmo2 board, an ev3 board, or both. If either or both are present, you will see one device in the VL called "impact." That VL device will appear to have one set of nodes if an ev3 board is present, a disjoint set of nodes if a cosmo2 is present, or the union of these sets of nodes if both boards are present. Yeah, this is a little weird. The set of nodes used by cosmo2 do not overlap with those used by ev3, and a given node on one board will have the same node number regardless of whether the other board is present, so you're pretty safe.

This VL device layout was chosen because an ev3 and a cosmo2 board are directly connected, meaning that one can create a path from any node on any board to any node on any other board. The VL was not equipped to handle creating VLPaths between nodes on different devices.