Support for ARM-Linux

[em_uk]

and today they reached 5 million sales. Amazing for a toy.

Oh, and I have many Pis - A B, 2 B+s and a Pi2. So I know exactly what I'm talking about.

[Danilo]

The Raspberry Pi 2 has a QuadCore CPU running at 900MHz (ARM Cortex-A7), and has 1GByte RAM.

For more power, an ODROID could be interesting, wouldn't it?
- ODROID-C1: 1.5Ghz quad-core CPU (Amlogic ARM® Cortex®-A5(ARMv7)), 1GByte RAM
- ODROID-U3: 1.7GHz quad-core CPU (Samsung Exynos4412 Prime Cortex-A9), 2GByte RAM
- ODROID-XU3: 2.0GHz quad-core CPU (Samsung Exynos5422 ARM® Cortex™-A15) + 1.4GHz quad-core Cortex™-A7 (makes 8 cores), 2GByte RAM

All 3 can run Linux and Android.

[bbanelli]

and today they reached 5 million sales. Amazing for a toy.

No, not really amazing. Still lower than Tamagotchi. And Pet Rock.

Oh, and I have many Pis - A B, 2 B+s and a Pi2. So I know exactly what I'm talking about.

Well, I am happy if you are satisfied with them. That still doesn't make them anything less a toy; unless you have some updates regarding points a - d I stated in my last post.

Once again, I am not disputing fact that RbP is nice cool device. Nothing more, nothing less. Is it worth trouble of porting PB to ARM where PB is run by handfull of people? Hardly.

The Raspberry Pi 2 has a QuadCore CPU running at 900MHz (ARM Cortex-A7), and has 1GByte RAM.

For more power, an ODROID could be interesting, wouldn't it?
- ODROID-C1: 1.5Ghz quad-core CPU (Amlogic ARM® Cortex®-A5(ARMv7)), 1GByte RAM
- ODROID-U3: 1.7GHz quad-core CPU (Samsung Exynos4412 Prime Cortex-A9), 2GByte RAM
- ODROID-XU3: 2.0GHz quad-core CPU (Samsung Exynos5422 ARM® Cortex™-A15) + 1.4GHz quad-core Cortex™-A7 (makes 8 cores), 2GByte RAM

All 3 can run Linux and Android.

"Power" is less of a trouble for RbP, it will easily handle Full HD video material and other tasks. Trouble is with peripherals which simply couldn't fit in 35$ price range and provide sane price/performance ratio. SD card interface is quite a trouble and very picky for SD card that will yield good performances, and LAN and USB is quite buggy and slow... :\

[smishra]

The reality of the marketplace is that ARM is dominant now, and even more specifically Android/Linux on ARM is dominant. The price point and innovation possible with open source Android/Linux on ARM is amazing.

We design industrial devices and mobile gadgets. Increasingly even the processors and chips used in devices are designed and made in China. The prices of these chips are a fraction of the chips made by main stream US and European chip companies.

Chip design companies in China are licensing the ARM core and producing ARM processors at a fraction of the cost of ARM processors from other companies. Intel does not license low cost x86 cores to embed in chips. There is simply no margin for Intel to compete on either price or power consumption here.

2.5W power consumption is high. ARM is designed from ground up to minimize power consumption. While working at assembly level and controlling multi core ARM CPUs I have had several wow moments after realizing all the things that ARM does architecturally to lower power consumption.

Similarly a free and open source OS like Android/Linux leaves no price margin for anything else to compete. iOS will be left with a niche and highly profitable market, but the vast majority of devices run and will continue to run Android/Linux on ARM in the foreseeable future.

[heartbone]

It is pretty amazing how much the viable hardware form factor has shrunk.
I remember when such a device could not be sold due to non-compliance with the FCC radiation emissions shielding.
With cable TV nowadays the interference with the important TV broadcasting is not a problem.
I can only assume that nowadays people are a lot more resistant to the EMFs.

Again assuming that the PB compiler was ported to the Raspberry Pi hardware, in order to get this single board computer into a state where one could use it as a development system, one would need things like the necessary internet connection and some sort of hard drive, enough ram, along with the standard keyboard & mouse (exclude the printer and monitor from the cost).

Assuming again that there is no need for case shielding, can this hardware be transformed into a usable configuration which really compete in price with the low end $120 and $130 Windows 7® desktops?

I'm using an 8 year old dual booting computer right now and I'm thinking that the average 4 year old computer may be good for another 4 years.
Wouldn't these already assembled systems be a better bang for the buck whereas a serious developer might feel constrained by attempting to develop software on a more limited system?

- Is there a price differential once the system is developer friendly?
- Would 1 GB of RAM be enough?
- Would the price difference make up for the shortcomings, if there are any? (I'm thinking about gamepad and audio codec support shortcomings.)

Linux development can often mean being on the bleeding edge, which can be quite rewarding when successful.
But usually it's a frustrating mess, and there should be definite answers before embarking.

A better way to go might be to port the Raspberry Pi OS onto the Wintel hardware, so the software development could happen in a more friendly hardware environment.

[Marc56us]

Hi heartbone,

Again assuming that the PB compiler was ported to the Raspberry Pi hardware, in order to get this single board computer into a state where one could use it as a development system, one would need things like the necessary internet connection and some sort of hard drive, enough ram, along with the standard keyboard & mouse (exclude the printer and monitor from the cost).

Raspberry have internal network card (RJ45), and can use BT and Wifi dongle (on usb), so Internet connection is easy
Raspberry use standard keyboard (usb) and mouse (usb) and monitor (hdmi)
Raspberry use SD card as hard drive and can use external usb hard drive

A better way to go might be to port the Raspberry Pi OS onto the Wintel

There is no really "Raspberry Pi OS", because Raspberry use Linux

Have a look at the faq, you will be surprised
http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/

Power is relative: I used a PC for 10 years! (as 24/7 mail serveur with sendmail) who was 10 times less powerful (CPU/RAM/HD) than a raspberry

I think raspberry users do not necessarily want to develop on this platform but want to use binary.

[macros]

The day ARM Linux will be supported I will donate at least one N900 to the Purebasic Devs.

It is a fully usable mobile computer, very small, with a keyboard, with the pssibility to run debian and all the apps that come with it. As a side note it can be used as phone.
Currently I am trying to run qemu on it so I can use it to code PB while traveling with the train. But I guess it will be unbearably slow.
A native arm version would just be awesome.

Sucessors liek the Nokia N9 and the Jolla Phone could run naive arm Apps to, they are just not as usable to code because they lack a hardware Keyboard.

[heartbone]

Hi heartbone,

Again assuming that the PB compiler was ported to the Raspberry Pi hardware, in order to get this single board computer into a state where one could use it as a development system, one would need things like the necessary internet connection and some sort of hard drive, enough ram, along with the standard keyboard & mouse (exclude the printer and monitor from the cost).

Raspberry have internal network card (RJ45), and can use BT and Wifi dongle (on usb), so Internet connection is easy
Raspberry use standard keyboard (usb) and mouse (usb) and monitor (hdmi)
Raspberry use SD card as hard drive and can use external usb hard drive

A better way to go might be to port the Raspberry Pi OS onto the Wintel

There is no really "Raspberry Pi OS", because Raspberry use Linux

Have a look at the faq, you will be surprised
http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/

Power is relative: I used a PC for 10 years! (as 24/7 mail serveur with sendmail) who was 10 times less powerful than a raspberry

I think raspberry users do not necessarily want to develop on this platform but want to use binary.

That makes sense. So... then... is the development platform on Wintel hardware?
Again if the Raspberry Pi development is occuring on the Wintel hardware,
then my questions are inappropriate for this discussion and I apologize for dragging that perspective into it.

Now, I just took a glance at the crimson on light pink FAQ, and tried to peer through the glare.
I saw the words buy price cost far too often.
That and something about what you just posted, could just possibly might bring to mind the reliability factor.

How many of us have bought ridiculously cheap gear only to have it fail in a year or so?
I'm certainly guilty of doing that to procure what I initially thought to be a good deal.
Whether it be a DVD player, a video camera, or the latest case where my youngest's mp3 player folder no longer shows up on any computer.
(The latest failure is acceptable as the player has lasted at least six, maybe seven years and it still works, just no more adds.)
Is there valid data on the system's reliability?
The cheap price is there for a reason.
Perhaps most serious developers would keep a backup or two?
Of course if the code development is occuring on the Wintel platform, then again that is not a serious concern.

[Marc56us]

Now, I just took a glance at the crimson on light pink FAQ, and tried to peer through the glare.
I saw the words buy price cost far too often.
That and something about what you just posted, could just possibly might bring to mind the reliability factor.

Yes, but reliability is not always necessary
Computer reliability is needed for critical usage (ie: plane, car, satellite, medical etc), but many Raspberry users use it for home usage. You can make a home NAS for less $100 ($35 Raspberry + a USB HD). In case of failure, not back in the store, buy a new card (half the price of a technician time)

Many Raspberry card are used for home or school robotic activity and PureBasic is good and easy for communication programming (COM and Socket) so PureBasic for Raspberry will be a good thing.

[heartbone]

Yes, but reliability is not always necessary
Computer reliability is needed for critical usage (ie: plane, car, satellite, medical etc), but many Raspberry users use it for home usage. You can make a home NAS for less $100 ($35 Raspberry + a USB HD). In case of failure, not back in the store, buy a new card (half the price of a technician time)

Many Raspberry card are used for home or school robotic activity and PureBasic is good and easy for communication programming (COM and Socket) so PureBasic for Raspberry will be a good thing.

Looking further into the FAQ, I grok the market where it is aimed, the casual computer hacker hobbyist. The device seems to be just about perfect for that niche where reliability is not much of an issue.

Another factor to consider is, as some others have already posted, a language as deep in functionality as PureBasic is would certainly need to be cut down for the creative users in the Raspberry environment, and many of them would probably resent that.

[DK_PETER]

LOL!!
PureBasic for RBP?
Talk about entering a minor niche.
Suppose the team (four guys - Fred, Freak, Comtois and Polo) said yes.
How many copies do you really think they will sell in total?

Four excellent guys must continue to support a cross platform programming language
in x86 and x64 versions. They got SpiderBasic too to deal with.

Then there are the non-stop bug-fixing and massive feature requests of all types (realistic and unrealistic).

Dream on folks...Be thankfull that the team will continue to support and improve/enhance existing products.

[fsw]

LOL!!
PureBasic for RBP?
Talk about entering a minor niche.
Suppose the team (four guys - Fred, Freak, Comtois and Polo) said yes.
How many copies do you really think they will sell in total?

Four excellent guys must continue to support a cross platform programming language
in x86 and x64 versions. They got SpiderBasic too to deal with.

Then there are the non-stop bug-fixing and massive feature requests of all types (realistic and unrealistic).

Dream on folks...Be thankfull that the team will continue to support and improve/enhance existing products.

I concur.

It would make more sense for Fred & Co. to expand SpiderBasic into a Chrome compiler generating pexes (sandboxed apps, compiled to native binary on first run). This way it doesn't matter on which hardware the program is running. Just install Chrome (runs on ALL major operating systems, workstations, tablets, smartphones...) or use a ChromeOS device (x86-64 or ARM).

[bbanelli]

2.5W power consumption is high. ARM is designed from ground up to minimize power consumption.

Mind you, that is exactly the SDP of new Snapdragon 80x SoC's (recent "trouble" with LG implementation and some waving with lawsuits, if you remember). And it has lower performance per core than Atom (which is two years old architecture now).

You are talking about Chinese Allwinner-type ARM's, right?

[heartbone]

It would make more sense for Fred & Co. to expand SpiderBasic into a Chrome compiler generating pexes (sandboxed apps, compiled to native binary on first run). This way it doesn't matter on which hardware the program is running. Just install Chrome (runs on ALL major operating systems, workstations, tablets, smartphones...) or use a ChromeOS device (x86-64 or ARM).

Assuming that Google really is not the real life Skynet, (something that I am not yet ready to do), would these pexes be able to process the PB networking commands?

You are talking about Chinese Allwinner-type ARM's, right?

Quoting you not quite but almost entirely out of context, I'm seeing some serious Olympic arm wrestling there.

[fsw]

Assuming that Google really is not the real life Skynet, (something that I am not yet ready to do),

Cannot say for sure. (at this point in time)

However, we humans are really good at transforming something good into something bad.
Therefore the real question should not be IF, but WHEN will they become Skynet.

would these pexes be able to process the PB networking commands?

Generally speaking, yes.
However, it would also depend on Spiderbasic's implementation.