2013年9月24日 星期二

To gaining boards conpetence


From the beginning, industrial board manufacturers architectures stressed lowest-cost, low-power hardware, with an emphasis on multimedia and graphics. This led the Raspberry Pi Foundation and BeagleBoard.org to adopt ARM architectures for the processing element in their embedded computer boards, resulting in similar architectures with comparable performance that catered to educational and hobbyist developers. Since then, variants have evolved to increase pin access and optimize performance for a range of development applications.

“All of the DIY ARM boards have broadly the same architecture – a System-on-Chip (SoC), which contains the processing, multimedia, and I/O in a networking appliance configuration, and one or two external chips to provide functionality that is missing from the core SoC,” says Eben Upton, Executive Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation. “There are a number of boards based on a couple of different SoCs that use Cortex-A8 cores at around 1 GHz; these can get ahead of the Raspberry Pi a little on integer and networking appliance, but lag behind on floating-point performance and multimedia, as A8s have a very weak Floating-Point Unit (FPU).”



refer to:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/