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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @08:24PM (#803647)

    ARM is not a chip, it is an instruction set. ARM the company controls licensing of it, but you can get microcontrollers with an ARM chipset for literally pennies in volume from numerous sources.

    If you're looking for a SoC, ARM is the best choice going right now because of its low transistor count and high compute power to watt ratio and that isn't likely to change because there's only so many ways to skin that cat.

    There are other instruction sets too, and if you want MIPs, there are cores you can license and have put into anything you like
    https://www.mips.com/products/ [mips.com]

    Right now MIPs is trying to target IoT applications though.