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ARM Processor On a Breadboard (hackaday.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A normal Arduino is easy to use and cheap, but it is a reasonably slow 8-bit processor with limited memory. Why do people use them? They are simple to use and set up. Hackaday shows how to take a cheap ($6) 32-bit CPU in a breadboard-friendly package, plug in a small number of parts (resistors, LEDs, and a cable), and use an online Arduino-like IDE to program it. The chip is way more powerful than an 8-bit Arduino and the code is comparable in complexity to an Arduino sketch that does the same thing. It's an easy way to get into embedded without having to suffer through 8-bit processors. And the new Arduinos also use 32-bit ARM, so that's an option too.
8 bit processors are simple, functional and a joy to program; what moron thinks one "suffers" from using the proper sized tool for a job?
Or you just buy a ST Nucleo for around $10. It's a whole family of STM32 ARM Cortex MCUs available on the same board with Arduino Uno R3 compatible headers and every IO pin exposed.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
A lot of the physics doesn't lend itself to 0-255 integer values, GPS location too, really not 0-255 integer, and when you get to advanced features like camera tracking you really won't manage it.
I think you're kidding yourself about ARM taking several cycles per instructions, its often less than 1 due to pipe-lining parallelizing operations, and more registers mean less transfers to and from memory.
"No, it isn't, you're just only looking at the MHZ and not the actual real world performance"
Sorry, ARM blows it away in the real world. Its a faster chip, it processes bigger numbers per instruction (32 bit vs 8 bit), has more bandwidth to memory (moves more data per cycle). I think your comment is wishful thinking, but then again I'm an 8 bit guy at heart too.