Let's say you've got something that needs to be computerised at a slightly higher level than an Arduino, with the computing part costing less than about $100-150, and ideally less than $50 (think Beaglebone, Odroid, PCEngine, Pi and clones, Pine, etc). It looks like the only choice is between ARM at the low end and x86 at the high end. Everything else has fallen by the wayside: The last MIPS-based product was the Ci20/Ci40 from 2015 and neither the hardware nor software have been updated since, PowerPC is out there but only as high-priced SBCs and good luck finding a distro that supports it, Sparc is left with Fujitsu working on it for mainframes, and RISC-V is still a glint in everyone's eye - the few SBCs based on it cost more than a low-end server, and despite various enthusiastic press releases I can't see any timeline where I can get a $50 RISC-V device that performs the same as a $50 ARM-based one. And then there's the software support, once you leave the x86 world you've got, outside of various specialised RTOSes, Linux. A very few systems have one or two of the BSDs, often in a hit-and-miss manner, but that's it.
Has Linux + ARM/x86 killed everything else?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:55PM (1 child)
I was going to say, I don't think it's Linux that did the killing - more typical free market forces...
Low end x86 is too costly for some applications, but high end x86 is powerful enough for all but the most esoteric high power applications.
Low end ARM is cheap enough that anything cheaper would need to have production quantities in the millions for the price difference to matter, and high end ARM overlaps with low end x86.
Off the top end of the scale, Linux does have some support for esoteric supercomputing, but unless you need that, you're not going to pay to go there.
Off the bottom end of the scale, there's not enough power in the chips to warrant a Linux-like OS, so they're out there on their own with RTOS or less - but, again, production quantities in the tens of millions can support $500K in custom development work to shave $0.50 off the BOM.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:49PM
The x86 glue chips make for an expensive design.
You don't need them with ARM or PowerPC.
In many cases, you don't need a CPU/MCU if you use a FPGA, which will often have a hard or soft ARM core.
PowerPC is still dominant for telecom, and single-core performance. It is harder to write good multi-core code (even threaded code can be tough, as it often gets run on a single core because of memory sharing between the threads).