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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 driverless on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:36AM (3 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:36AM (#803863)

    There's a lot out there if you point at individual SoCs, but a lot less with complete systems (outside of the Arm/x86 duopoly). That's why I mentioned things like the Odroid, Pi, and Pine, you buy the hardware, drop whatever distro you want on it, and it's ready to go. With some of the things you mention, a certain amount of manufacturing is required before you can use them...

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  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday February 20 2019, @02:57PM (2 children)

    by Rich (945) on Wednesday February 20 2019, @02:57PM (#803983) Journal

    With some of the things you mention, a certain amount of manufacturing is required before you can use them...

    That's even the case with the RasPi or a mini-ITX, which usually have to be mounted in some case. Also, those little critters are hardly suitable for many standalone applications, so they will always be "manufactured" into being part of something larger, from heating regulation to home entertainment. How much solder flows depends. You might want to cleanly connect a Pine 64 for audio to a speaker output panel by soldering, whereas a quick and dirty tooling control might just be a PDIP chip or module wired up solderlessly on a breadboard.

    What I consider sorely missing, ARM or not, is a cheap widget of any sort with a monitor. Kind of like the 50-bucks China phones. Beefy SoC, couple hundred Megs, or a Gig of RAM, 5-inch IPS screen, but instead of cameras and cell radio they'd have GPIO and mounting holes like the small SBCs and run a proper free Linux Stack. The RasPi screen is still way out of that "no need to think about whether to buy a few" price territory, and especially given that price really badly underperforming. 4-inch-DSI touch screens start at a bit over a tenner in China, that'd need a somewhat coherent offering together with one of the little SBCs.

    By the way, I retract my comment that Intel is completely out: I wasn't aware of the prices Asrock sells their all-integrated mini-ITX boards for at the moment. They match or beat the RK3399 offerings. A great deal if you don't need reliable realtime. Loss (?) leader for Intel, I guess. To quote Steve Jobs: "Cannibalize yourself, or others will." :)

    Also, I'd like to add that Synopsis have really nasty closed information policies about ARC, despite raving how great open-source is on their gcc pages, but then referring to their NDA-only stuff from otherwise empty gcc documentation. Yeah, right, it's great as long as they get an optimizing compiler for free, without anything in return. They need some serious butt-kicking from the RISC-V scene.

    Finally (but ARM again), I saw that Microchip/Atmel has a "SAM4S" series (120 MHz, 64K SRAM, 128K Flash) on offer at about half what the less powerful STM32 i mentioned costs when bought as a chip in the west.

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday February 21 2019, @02:22AM (1 child)

      by driverless (4770) on Thursday February 21 2019, @02:22AM (#804333)

      In my case I really want something that's self-hosted (which I should have mentioned in the OP). I spend way too much work time interacting with systems via ICEs and similar, so in my free time I want something I can just ssh into and make any needed changes that way. Admittedly the 5V Arm-based systems are nice that way, you drop them in wherever you need them, run 12 or 24V out to them, and locally drop whatever the voltage is by the time it gets there to the required 5V via a UBEC. The WiFi support has also slowly, painfully got better over time, in that you can mostly rely on it remaining network-connected between software updates/upgrades, although running wired ethernet to a WiFi bridge is the way to go for guaranteed reliability.

      Still wish there was something other than Arm/Intel to work with though...

      • (Score: 2) by Rich on Friday February 22 2019, @12:15PM

        by Rich (945) on Friday February 22 2019, @12:15PM (#804990) Journal

        What about MicroPython on the ESP32? Checks all the boxes, not? Oddball CPU and REPL shell over WiFi should be doable (funnily enough, ssh shell seemed to be a challenge for them, but web REPL over https worked, as I read one of the threads). If the language has to be a bit oddball, too, there's LUA RTOS which comes with the dropbear ssh server. Board costs a fiver from China, tenner local. A bit more downscale, it can run the Arduino libs (with OTA access from the IDE), and bit more upscale, if it's got to be really UNIX-like, ESP32 will also run NuttX, but they seem to have an issue with getting wifi firmware they can use.