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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the Good-Fast-Cheap...pick-two dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:08PM (1 child)

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:08PM (#803514)

    PowerPC is out there but only as high-priced SBCs and good luck finding a distro that supports it

    PowerPC and POWER are the same thing, right? Or do I have my terminology wrong? There are videos and demos out there of people running Debian, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE on the Raptor Talos 2 PowerPC workstation with full desktop, web browser, office suite, etc... etc... so it's not cheap but it works fine. If I was childless I'd have one, but kids are expensive.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:51PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:51PM (#803635) Journal

    I'm getting old, but if memory serves from my 1990s days as a classic Mac developer, Power PC is mostly a subset of POWER. But I would be happy to be corrected if this is wrong.

    This [wikipedia.org] might actually explain it better.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.