3 ms·
"Embedded" is too vague to use for this. Tons of STB's have SOC's with MIPS cores and Linux kernels (and uclibc). The cost could be the cost of the transistors
by cardiffspaceman 11y ago
"Embedded" is too vague to use for this. Tons of STB's have SOC's with MIPS cores and Linux kernels (and uclibc). The cost could be the cost of the transistors used up by the CPU cores that could go to valuable functions like codec support. The cost could be RAM interface circuitry. The cost could be a dozen things and Linux is adopted in this category of system. It's almost like OpenBSD is defining itself as too good for use in economical, workaday products. I'm sure that would be a misunderstanding by me.
- tedunangst 11y agoThe OpenBSD project will not (cannot) prevent you from developing your own mips32 port.
- bsder 11y agoThe cost of an SoC is almost insensitive to the size of the CPU core. Only RAM and Flash matter. I'm not joking, here's an STM32F103VGT6 (Arm Cortex M3--not even an A-series which you normally use to run Linux). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:STM32F103VGT6-HD.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:STM32F103VGT6-HD.jpg Note that this is a little flash heavy (1MB) but pretty mainstream with RAM (96KB). The RAM and flash absolutely DWARF the core. You could double the size of the core (32 to 64 bit), and that would still be true. The writing is on the wall for 32-bit on anything running a "real" operating system.