ARM-Based ATX Mobos

mirko writes: "Chalice Technologies has released an ARM-based ATX motherboard : the CATS. The CATS supports SDRAM, USB and PCI among other features, which makes it easy for anybody to assemble a reliable computer with low-cost equipment. Regarding their price along with their ability to run both ARMLinux or NetBSD, these boards are an interesting alternative to set up a cheap but powerful server."

Comments

Great for development.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I believe it's more of a development, hobbiest, tinkerer, workstation kind of thing. No one in their right mind would buy an ARM as a desktop system. (At least, not in this form.)

Things may have changed since I was dealing with this (a couple years ago)...

If you are designing a system-on-a-chip ASIC and need a low-power, low-silicon-consumption, high-performance processor to embed, your choices were pretty much limited to the ARM and the MIPS families. And they were also limited by the fab you chose - most had one or the other available, few had both.

There are several big advantages to doing your software development on a platform that runs the same instruction set as the target or a superset of it. Two big ones:

- You can use the native development environment. (This was even more important a couple years back, because gcc's cross-platform support was badly broken.)

- You can run most of the target code on the workstation.

MIPS machines have been available with unix and linux for a very long time. Think SGI. (We bought a Cobalt Qube just to get a development environment for MIPS, after wasting more than its cost trying to get gcc/g++ to compile for a MIPS on a Sun. Found out later that we'd have needed a few hundred lines of patch from Cygnus to get cross-gcc to work.)

This board, running the Linux or BSD environments, provides an equivalent for the ARM family.

ARM cores tend to be smaller and lower power than MIPS for equivalent functionality. Being able to throw together an ARM development environment by stuffing this board into a PC case and loading Linux onto it is a great boon to garage-shop "fabless semiconductor companies".