• Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
    minator
    Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
    Jim,
    Quote:

    With its memory, processor, and GPU limitations, I still favor an A15 over the RPi.


    Raspberry is the product of a charity, it's meant to be functional and cheap. That said time has moved on since it was started and you can now get Mac mini type power for the same price.

    Type "iPEGTOP" into ebay ...No, I'm not joking.

    You'll get a load of cheap USB computers with specs quite significantly higher than the RPi
    Dual core Cortex A9, 1.6GHz. 1GB DDR3 Ram 8GB flash, USB, HDMI, WiFi etc...
    They're quite limited but at that price who cares!

    No A15s down there but once the Chinese start making them...


    As for the whole x86 Vs ARM debate for MophOS I can kind see the benefits of both sides.
    The closed platform and raw processing power of the Macs makes them a very good target but good Macs ain't cheap.

    ARMs don't have the same level of processing power but see above.

    If anything they should be cross platform, Macs for the high end, cloud sticks for the "mass market" low end.

    As for the problem of every ARM from different companies being a different architecture isn't quite what it once was.
    That's true at the high end where companies can afford to add their own components.

    At the low end it's completely different. The low end guys compete on price so they just buy in parts and put them together. Well, it's actually nowhere near that simple but the point is they are not developing their own modules, they use standard parts most of which probably come from ARM.

    As for how you would support 2 platforms well there's an answer to that but I suspect it'll be rather unpopular.
    Use a Linux Kernel.
    You get all the drivers, protected memory and multiprocessor support built in.
    You customise the kernel for low latency, cut out all the legacy guff and build the MorphOS environment on top.

    Won't this just make MorphOS into a Linux distro?
    No, Linux distros are a hodge podge of open source components on top of one another.
    Android uses a Linux kernel but it's nothing remotely like any Linux distro.

    I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion but remember the kernel is only one component and it's completely invisible to the user. I suspect it'd speed up development quite significantly.

    <runs away>
  • »19.03.13 - 23:12
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