AMD to stop working on Geodes

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Carlos Nazareno wrote:
> Do ARM processors do these things better than anything else on the
> market right now? but then you lose the X86 compatibility and this
> probably breaks things for cross-platform upstream contributions for
> any deved/researched write-once-run-many apps/projects. (correct me if
> I'm wrong, am just speculating because I'm not a CE and as well-versed
> with computer architecture)

Sugar has been tested on both x86 and ARM [1].  I expect it would run
perfectly on MIPS, PPC, SPARC, Itanium, Alpha...  Linux runs on just about
every major architecture, and I expect the same of just about any
Linux-based system.

I'm not too worried about upstream support.  Our Activities are mostly
written in Python or portable C, and the underlying operating system is
typically based on Fedora, Debian[2], Gentoo[3]... which already support
all of the above architectures.

It's true that you lose the ability to run arbitrary binaries from other
platforms, but this is only important if you care about closed-source
code.  Most important open source programs are easily recompiled for any
architecture.

--Ben

[1] http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardSugar
[2] http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
[3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/index.xml#doc_chap4

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