On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Frank <ultima.ratio.regum69(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with you about the beagleboard but two two others things
will
be available in a few months.
A low-cost netbook (200$) with freescale platform (before this summer
it seems and with ubuntu-arm i believe) and a similar thing with
qualcomm (don't know when). This two products will be less "geeky"
than beagleboard and more usable (or attractive) for the average joe.
As you said, the big trouble with ARM is, except instructions set, a
lot of things change from one CPU to another : GPU, SIMD, ...
It remember me the old days of first PC GPU : an API from each
manufacturer. It may be a drawback in a near future as i'm not sure
mplayer, xorg, openssl, ... can use these SoC at their full potential.
Regards,
Frank
There's also that Marvel SheevaPlug (1) for $100, although only
'armv5' but 1.2Ghz/512Mb which i've pre-ordered and planning to add to
my current beagle farm.
mplayer - the arm maintainer (ffmpeg) is very active on the
beagleboard irc/forums. He is doing his best discovering every
neon/gcc related bug. (quite a few in gcc 4.3 for armv7-a)
xorg - most arm cores use an old closed source binary blob from powervr...
1:
http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sh...
Regards,
--
Robert Nelson
http://www.rcn-ee.com/