Small group @ TI readying a low-cost development board, open hardware design

beagleboard.org

5 points·pmorici··3 comments

Entry of Intel in the mobile segment is forcing traditional ARM-based SoC makers to open up their software tools etc. Even though Intel doesnt have anything that competes with OMAP series lets say, Intel does have a thoroughly documented instruction set and one which is very well supported by compilers etc. Compared to it, compilers for TI DSP's for example still cost a fortune usually.

When the intel Atom x86 chip starts to appear in small embedded devices, its really going to shake up this sector. Until recently, you had to have all sorts of customized kernels, toolchains etc just to get whatever opensource project that scratched your itch to run embedded.

Soon your post-it sized computer can just run centos with a more or less stock kernel. Forget that arm nonsense. You can do it now with a Soekris (Geode CPU) http://www.soekris.com/ if you're so inclined. You don't even have to be a "hand selected early adopter" to be able to buy one.

Geode based platforms are fine if your making some sort of pizza box type router thing but generally they lack a lot of the peripheral IO, both variety and quantity, that an ARM SOC board would have like i2c, spi, rs232, etc... Geode boards are also a order of magnitude larger than things like the Beagle board or the Gumstix (www.gumstix.com).

The major inhibitor to using these arm platforms isn't the compiler it's that there aren't any low cost dev boards which are a practical size that you could also use in a prototype, w/o getting a hardware engineer to make a custom board layout for you. That's why I find things like this exciting. At least in my opinion.

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