[Coco] Arduino question

[gene heskett]

On Sunday, October 02, 2011 02:39:11 PM Mark Ormond did opine:

> It's using the wiznet chip on the Ethernet shield.
> (I've got one of the original run that's a little different)
> 
> That alone is 45.00 over at sparkfun.

Are you at a place where you can talk about it?  I was under the 
impression, really from reading between the lines, that it was 100% flash 
code and a few of the arduino's relatively plentiful i/o pins.  Probably 
with the ethernets broadband baluns of course.  Arduino is I believe an ARM 
product, and ATM the ARM branch of linux seems to be the subject of a huge 
development project, with the ARM builds being every bit as functional as 
the X86 builds.

One of the problems with any of this much faster than the coco stuff is the 
coco's own limited memory bandwidth, which might be slightly alleviated by 
adding a DMA controller to the coco, something that gets smack in the 
middle of the hardware to be sure, but the only real problem would be the 
IRQ's, and the dma cycles delaying them.  I do not believe this can be 
accomplished from the game port as those pins on the 6x09's aren't normally 
tied to any active circuitry.  Nitros9 would of course need a new module to 
tie & sync the dma, which I'd assume would need at least 4 more getstt's 
and setstat's in order to handle the memory allocations and notices thereof 
to processes that would use the DMA'd data.

One of the enticements to look at ARM is the processing power per watt of 
power consumed, it is easily 10x more efficient than current X86 cpu's. 
90mhz chips use less than a watt from what I've read.

? for Steve B. How do the arm chips stack up to your stack test?

> Later,
> Dabone


Cheers, Gene
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