bpa;256499 Wrote: > > The current SBC is a first iteration of Jive h/w & s/w and it has been > a learning experience. For some of the developers, it seems to be their > first serious experience of an ARM platform and are discovering which > optimisations are worthwhile. As such, the system is not comparable to > a mobile phone software platforms which has had many years of > development and gone through many iterations.
You'd be surprised! Given the pace of development, platforms change at an incredible rate, every six months is not unusual and libraries and components change at an equally astonishing rate at times as vendors move in and out of favour. Most devices are based on a limited number of RTOS and there are definite attempts to standardise on platforms, but it's also in the interests of platform providers to get customers to move onto the latest and greatest, so they don't last for that long. The previous company I was CTO of had an excellent R&D team and they are now the 3D graphics team at ARM. We went into some heavy code optimisation and at times worked closely with ARM so that we could review future processor designs for multimedia capability. However the best results we got were from algorithmic changes, not processor tweaking. The ARM RVCT tool chain provides excellent code output, 40% faster than GNU at the time, so writing assembler wasn't worth the effort. In other words, just because it's an ARM processor didn't make that much difference in the end. A knowledge of embedded systems and system holistics was important though. Avoiding stalls due good caching behaviour and keeping as much as possible in SoC memory were all important, amongst other things, but the big wins were always by being smart in the algorithm and consuming less cycles on a much larger scale. -- CardinalFang ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CardinalFang's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=962 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=41805 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
