Thank you for that well-explained clarification. I work beside an ex-ARM
designer and he has explained this to some of us a few times, but I generally
did not pay as much attention as I should. It is sad that the author of the
article did not do his reasearch very well (unlike the Groklaw community, who,
like PJ herself, thrive on accuracy, as you have shown), but it does not change
my perception, as a casual observer, very much, as I only see a Lego product
with some kind of ARM processor running Linux, which is good as far as the FOSS
ecosystem is concerned, which was my main reason for posting it. If I was
comparing performance, or actually programming the thing, then of course the
version of ARM and its instruction set and performance would matter very much,
and you have nicely filled out many of those details for us. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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The ARM
Architecture page, or here
should show you it is, likely, speaking of the Cortex ARM A9 MP which runs on an
ARMv7 architecture. The latest ARM is ARMv8, here and here Of course they could also be talking about ARM9 which is an old and obsolete
spec. Or it may be that ARMv9 is in skunkworks right now and Lego will be
shipping a copy of the first ARMv9 processors. This may have been an
unintentional leak, but more likely a misunderstanding of the reporter.
Personally, I wouldn't consider anything today with less than a A9 quad-core and
would prefer A15 quad-core. That said, I have two rPis and an A9 dual core
tablet with a smoking quad-core graphics. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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