Embedded board with good support out of the box?

[Karel Gardas]

On 05/22/15 06:28 PM, Mr. Andrei Chichak wrote:
>
> On 2015-May-22, at 8:58 AM, Steve B <sbattazzo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The STM32F4 is on my list, but because our main number-crunching routine already takes 25% of our time step duty cycle on the AM3358 at 1GHz, it seems risky. If we pretend MIPS/MHz and FLOPS/MHz were a 1:1 map from the A8 to the M4, then we are guaranteed to violate timing. On the flip side, this number crunching part is not in any way optimized with embedded operation in mind, so there are at least a couple things I can think of  we could do that may allow us to squeeze it in to a Cortex M device.
>
> I think 1:1 would be optimistic, but you also don’t have to deal with a heavy OS or things like demand paged virtual memory.

AM3358 is Cortex-A8 IIRC which means in-order dual-issue CPU. On the 
other hand IIRC M4 is single issue in-order CPU so it's definitely not 
1:1. Also wikipedia lists M4 as 1.25 DMIPS/MHz and A8 as 2.0 DMIPS/MHz. 
To get to A8 performance level, you would need brand new M7 which 
provides 2.14 DMIPS/MHz[1].

Karel

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microarchitectures