pico Posted May 22, 2011 Share #41 Â Posted May 22, 2011 Advertisement (gone after registration) [...]Email Stefan Daniel on the subject of firmware - he'll tell you that even small changes in actual operation can cause a lot of parts to move around in the FW, which is tightly written code to fit into relatively small ROM space. Â I must disagree. Unless Leica chose an exceedingly small program space or crams java in there, there is lots of program space. Andy, remember the days when we cut over 2,000 lines of code to run RT in a 16-bit OS? It is usually high-stakes programming, thus time-consuming. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted May 22, 2011 Posted May 22, 2011 Hi pico, Take a look here So where is that 1.160 M9 firmware upgrade?. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
andybarton Posted May 22, 2011 Share #42 Â Posted May 22, 2011 I must disagree. Â On what grounds? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted May 22, 2011 Share #43 Â Posted May 22, 2011 On what grounds? Â Just as I wrote. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
adan Posted May 22, 2011 Share #44  Posted May 22, 2011 See minutes 2:30-3:30 in this video: An Interview with Leica's Stephan DanielKarbe  "High-stakes, time-consuming programming" costs money - Leica prefers to spend that money as few times a year as possible.  Do you actually know the capacity of the M9's ROM chip - the one that holds the firmware? The FW itself (1.138) is 5.7 megabytes - or at least the update patch is (the actual total FW may be bigger).  Leica has to consider cost, physical size and power drain (which is related to physical size in that the battery size is limited) - so they may very well be using "an exceedingly small program space."  I'd be interested in seeing the M9's actual ROM chip specs if anyone knows them. (Mark Norton having declined to autopsy an M9 the way he did an M8)  http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/leica-m8-forum/21331-anatomy-leica-m8.html  In his M8 dissection, he notes that the M8's microcontroller had 256 K (not M, K) of EPROM and 20K of RAM.  There must be additional space for firmware in the separate DSP chip, which accesses 5 x 64Mb of RAM (M8) - but that RAM space is what holds the nascent picture data for processing or until it is written to the SD card, so I doubt much of it holds "instructions" - even temporarily. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
adan Posted May 22, 2011 Share #45 Â Posted May 22, 2011 Leica is just stealing a page from Paul Masson (and Orson Welles) - "We will release no firmware before its time." Â Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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