JIRKA MADE ME PULL MY PHONE APART I'm a bit scatter-brained today. It sort of creeps up on me with days like this, it's not to the end of the day when you're looking back at all the time you've wasted, things you've stuffed up, and times you've almost fallen over that you realise, particularly in light of a contradictorary self-assuredness (which doesn't care how those words are spelt), that you're not quite yourself. Taking a break from that run-on sentence to dance to the randomly selected tracker module from new-year 1998 that your PC started playing is another hint. BIG HINT: there's a phone next to you that you pulled apart this morning. Why'd you do that? Oh yeah, some guy on the internet was asking about the CPU/RAM specs of the phones people use, so of course when it wasn't in the specs list... gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jirka/Phlog/2022_07_01.txt Hey it's not like I jumped at the screwdrivers straight away though, this was just early in the day after all. Sure it's not in the specs lists, like here: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_a411-2138.php But it's also not in the manual, which I do still have along with the box, Win 2000/XP driver CD, cables I've never used, receipts, and first SIM card, because I keep all this junk. Plus the phone itself doesn't say it _anywhere_ in its menus. Oh and Samsung didn't have official public names for their phone OSs back then, so there's no min. specs, target architectures, etc. stuff. Then there's the FCC certification documents, but they bothered to get them to keep all the interesting specs stuff quiet, and the internal pictures were too blury to see the chip markings. I mean right now I'm thinking "hack the FCC!", but nah this was earlier and I hadn't got quite that bad yet, so I just pulled the phone cover off and looked over the ships directly. SoC is a Qualcomm MSM627S. Hmm doesn't exist. No, MSM6275, hard to read where they'd put a sticker over it, OK here we go: https://archive.org/details/qualcomm_msm6275_docs 225MHz ARM926EJ-S. Wah! Over 100MHz, Jirka was asking about 100MHz - I've pulled my phone apart and I don't even get to send some guy an email about it?! Ha well there's still RAM - the block diagram shows it's connected externally along with flash. There's a memory-ish chip next to the SoC, printed over with a presumed firmware number, so probably flash but there's no obvious RAM chip near by. Samsung K5D1G13DCA-D090, which is some internal part that they don't have public datasheets for. But various generic-looking online stores always want to sell you these parts anyway for some reason, and one of these dubious sellers actually attempts a description as "MCP 1G Nand / 512M Mobile SDRAM". Huh, NAND Flash and SDRAM on the same chip, makes sense I suppose. The phone only has 54MB flash storage, but 1G/8 (because memory chip specs are always in bits instead of bytes, because like who are Samsung to presume your byte width, yeah and it looks bigger) = 128MB so maybe Samsung are actually wasteful enough to fill 74MB with OS data? Anyway that leaves 512M/8 = 64MB - under 128MB baby, I'm in the club. Rock on (to err... "-= Abandoned =- composed by Rage 19/Jun/1995 Finland")! Woo! Meh, I'm not in the mood for sending emails now. Oh yeah I was going to put this link in for the chip: https://www.jotrin.com/product/parts/K5D1G13DCA_D090 Ha, fooled you! I mean I actually have two of these phones and I pulled apart the spare, so umm, yeah. They're 3G of course so they'll be useless by this time next year anyway once that's turned off here in Aus, like my whole collection of old 2G phones. 4G phones only seem to exist in the annoying modern smartphony world where specs are not only published but actually seem to matter. I miss the old mobile phones from back when average people probably didn't even realise there was a computer in them. Actually I pulled apart the RF unit from an old AMPS car phone once - weird how all that and more gets stuffed into this one little circuit board. I only keep the phone in my car actually, which itself used to have a car phone in it once, but that was before I owned it, and maybe before I was born. I don't want people calling me when I'm out of the house, I barely put up with them calling my landline, the phone in my car is just for when I break down, or crash, or want to confuse people by being way too young to be the sort of person who still uses a flip-phone. I guess it would be fun to build a DIY 4G car phone, but then it would only last until everything switched to 5G. I'm building a cloud charge monitor instead at the moment - what better way to watch a lightning storm than on a large ~1950s panel meter? So I'm off to check my wiring and assemble that while watching music videos on Rage. Guess I'll put that phone back together tomorrow. Bye. - The Free Thinker (mellowed out a bit over the course of this phlog post) Oh and hey this mid-90s PC I'm posting from is only 120MHz with 80MB RAM, so it's like Jirka's workstation too. But it's not cool like an SGI, it's just the old nameless-brand Pentium beige box that was once the library book cataloging computer at my old primary school. It's got a SID chip in it now though, so that's cool. OK, no SIDs now though, Rage time. My TV ain't got 128MB RAM either, it's from the 90s too. Probably should set up something better that its mono audio for nights like this though. Fixed my washing machine by the way.