I would argue Milkymist, SAKC is not "either/or"
rather AND. Both projects are exciting and
each of them has tremendous potential. 

For controlling a robot (for example), SAKC
will be a great fit. And you've gotta love how
SAKC leverages the Nanonote development.

May a thousand** flowers bloom. 
 
**Or more. ;)
---
Ron K. Jeffries







On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 10:21, Sébastien Bourdeauducq <sebastien.bourdeauducq@lekernel.net> wrote:
On Saturday 27 February 2010 17:36:49 Carlos Camargo wrote:
> Ingenic's CPUs don't have a lot of peripherals, just the most popular for
> multimedia applications, If you have an specific Hardware task (FPU, PWM,
> communication Unit, etc) you can't use this processor, so, you must buy a
> commercial IC and interconnect it with the CPU, so, Again you need a lot of
> interfaces. Another solution is design your own SoC platform, but Milkymist
> work is in progress, and you need wait for it :)

You seem to overestimate the difficulty of using it :)
You can boot nommu Linux on it today - the few people I know who have a ML401
have been successful at doing it. Developing drivers for your particular
peripheral is like developing a driver for any other one. Furthermore, adding
peripherals is easy - last August, I was giving a workshop at /tmp/lab about
developing and adding simple peripherals (things like GPIO controllers and
beep generators) to Milkymist, and even people with < 30 hours of FPGA
programming experience were able to do it.

In terms of performance, Milkymist beats Xilinx Microblaze - making it a VERY
FAST softcore platform:
http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=829

Of course, there are still many problems - GCC sometimes crashes, software
packages using old versions of GNU Autocrap won't recognize the CPU, the FDPIC
executable loader is abominable (shared libraries won't work, some C++
features cause problems and compiling is a bit messy because of that), some
drivers (sound, HW acceleration etc.) are missing, etc. But if people put the
same amount of effort as they put into proprietary platforms (Blackfin, ARM,
...) instead of "waiting" for Milkymist to be ready thanks to some divine
action, these issues would probably be fixed in a couple of weeks. Many
software tasks are as simple, if not easier, to do on Milkymist as on the
other platforms - don't be afraid for it uses an FPGA.

Sébastien

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