@aflegg

Good point!

Being exclusively a developer on x86, I often forget that x86 code that heavily uses assembly for optimization isn't a straight port for non-x86 CPUs. You're 100% correct. Well structured C programs and other high-language programs would be much more easy to simply compile for the arm environment. High performance libraries (like libavcodec that I mentioned above) would likely rely on many low-level optimizations, that would take modification in key areas to run efficiently on the Nxxx series.

Assembly dialect translation should be a trivial matter for support's sake. I believe that the GNU assembler can already parse Intel/AT&T syntax and compile for different target architectures [GAS info here]. Granted, code performance wouldn't be the same, but at least the programs would be compilable and later can be tuned for performance.

By 'video bandwidth' are you referring to the cpu/memory/bus bottleneck limiting video output?


}:^)~
YARR!!