[Arm-netbook] EOMA68-IC1t successful board bring-up

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello,

On Thu, 16 Oct 2014 23:56:53 +0100
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:

[]

> > Yes, there are several ways to achieve that... but I meant that
> > maybe some projects will only compile with GCC (or run properly if
> > compiled with GCC), because they assume quirks in implementation,
> > invalid syntax in language standards but valid in GCC, and things
> > like that.  Like the reasons why Linux
> > kernel does not compile with LLVM.  I think that many projects
> > might have similar problems if the compiler is not GCC.
> 
>  well, we just have to suck it and see.  i think we will get a lot of
> support from ICubeCorp (hopefully this will not overwhelm their
> engineers) as they will *definitely* want to know when something
> doesn't work... and fix it!

Sorry, if you said that Cray, Inc. engineers would work on that
(because rumors say its their architecture, though I didn't see
someone presenting datasheet comparisons) - that at least somehow
would sound plausible, but ICubeCorp engineers? Ughh.

Do you follow ESP8266 WiFi chip teh-drama? The piece is supposed to
send bankrupt all western IoT chip makers (or maybe not), because
Chinese guys did something which guys like TI can't get right for years
with their CC3000 stuff.

The story unfolds as follows: The guys behind ESP8266
(https://espressif.com/) figured that while they have something cute
(heck, it even has builtin balun), the big guys like Mediatek and
Qualcomm are on their ass with their (much crappier) solutions. So,
they did 2 things: dumped ESP8266 on the markets on unbelievably low
price and leaked SDK based on proprietary compiler (which in turn is
based on Open64, what a coincidence!)

But of course they understand that they can't beat Mediatek and
Qualcomm with illegal leaked proprietary SDK, only legal open source
can be the answer. So they said they work on making GCC SDK.

And here's the salt of the story - no, they can't make it. Because in 2
weeks after ESP8266 went viral, the community, with the help of Cadence
engineers (Cadence now owning the Xtensa arch on which ESP8266's CPU is
based) already had a working GCC compiler:
https://github.com/jcmvbkbc/gcc-xtensa . So, the only choice Espressif
engineers are left with is to slowpoke for couple more months, then
take community work, screw it up a bit so it was professionally looking
proprietary stuff and release as theirs.


So, I wouldn't bet much on how far "ICubeCorp" could go without real
community involvement with their CPUs.


-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com