Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:23:26 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: wkb@freebie.demon.nl (Wilko Bulte) Cc: jhb@FreeBSD.ORG (John Baldwin), phk@FreeBSD.ORG (Poul-Henning Kamp), arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RANDOMDEV inspired realitycheck regarding i386/i486... Message-ID: <200011151723.KAA12325@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20001114075729.G333@freebie.demon.nl> from "Wilko Bulte" at Nov 14, 2000 07:57:29 AM
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> > > What is the consensus ? > > > > What is the current processor of choice for embedded stuff? Is > > x86 even a good architecture for embedded work? That is the > > only place that I would see the 386 still being alive... > > x86 has never been a good CPU for embedded. [eyes his trusty books > collection for Motorola's 680x0 ;) ] The Motorola strategy is broken; the processor they are selling for Palm Pilots has no MMU. It's no good for most embedded work (and is barely good enough for making Palm Pilots unstable with one single bad program). Cyrix, AMD, and various Card PCs are all 386-class CPUs. The IBM "Blue Lightning" core is a 386 class core, which is used to implement macrocell based embedded ASICs. Intel has two 386 macrocells that are used for embedded work. I'd have to say that not even the 80186 was dead yet... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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