Availability of a good processor, preferably one with good tools is number one, followed by the need for a processor well suited for certain tasks, and at number three in the priority list it may be that the tools, and even the processor design, may be Open Source (and possibly Free).
A lot of people appear to occupy themselves more with mocking things up, trying out new designs to make sure they never make it, obfuscating good software ideas, and eventually take the designs nobody can use anymore for themselves, and make a profit of that. That's not the good spirit I think the ARM/Epiphany board should succumb to.
The ECO32 I mentioned is a learning processor design, wiht broad general applicability, which fits in moderately small (for current norms) FPGAs, is fully Open Source, including the tools and the compiler. Also, I checked out all things work, on not specially set-up systems, which isn't always the case.
From the incompatible versions of compilers to the misunderstanding of what processors are good at, and how to use a potentially interesting board, there will always be people around who want only their own little Tower of Babel, instead of a thriving, interesting community with professional influence, good prices, and normal helpfulness and proper attribution of who contributes what.
Maybe one day Sony will Open Source it's hardware design for the h264 codec in their latest camera's, and possibly NVidia could open up their parallel Cuda processor chips to run Linux on the, what is it RISC-10,000 , processors... !
T.Statistics: Posted by theover — Tue Dec 31, 2013 2:24 pm
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