Richard Smith wrote:
I'm currently in the tail end of a large project that uses the PNX1500 and I can 100% say that working with this chip would be a large undertaking. The developement system _sucks_. One of the worst I've used. You thought a LinuxBIOS setup and compile was difficult somtimes. Its a breeze compared to the Phillips PNX stuff. Imagine if linux bios was 5 times its current size and the entire build system was written in perl.
All of the example source and system libraries come with headers that explictly forbid using the code or library in conjunction with _any_ open source type code. On top of that the chip (1500) is buggy.
All that said its a hauling ass video processing chip. We are doing realtime MPEG video encoding with it. But dosen't have any 3D graphics capabilities.
Linux on the Nomadik and the Nexperia's would be lot's of work with little support I agree. Philips never seems to release any source.
To bad SH never evolved since they had great floating point units. SH-6 or 7's with PCIe and larger caches would be great for multimedia and clusters. http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020118S0007
ARM has lots of Linux support but I have never found production silicon of an ARM core with FPU's and PCIe.
http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/ http://www.arm.com/
-Bari