[fedora-arm] Cheap ARM devices

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 02:26:07PM -0500, Chris Tyler wrote:

> > RAM is a really good point, I think it will be in the ballpark of 256
> > (plus or minus a bit). Also, I'd like to open up the conversation
> > about version of ARM we as a SIG want to support as the efforts start
> > to ramp up while targeting popular devices. I think ARMv9 might be a
> > little too aggressive but are there any devices that are still
> > prominent that are ARMv5? Would it be possible (or even feasible) to
> > maintain ARMv5, ARMv7, and ARMv9 in parallel and treat them as
> > separate architectures?
> 
> The ARM "Family" vs. "Architecture" numbering is wonky (and very
> frustrating - larger numbers don't reliably mean newer, bigger, faster,
> or better). The SheevaPlug uses an "ARM9E" family chip, which uses the
> "ARMv5TEJ" architecture.

Actually, the SheevaPlug has a Marvell-designed CPU core, which doesn't
have anything to do with ARM9-the-implementation (which is an implementation
of ARM-the-spec by ARM-the-company) (note the intentionally confusingly
chosen terminology here).

The SheevaPlug CPU core is sometimes compared to ARM926, though, since
that's ARM-the-company's ARM-the-implementation that it is most similar
to in terms of software visible features.

Both ARM926 and the SheevaPlug CPU core conform to ARM-the-spec version 5.