Arm's dominance in the embedded sphere is based upon it's licensable ISA. It is a proprietary instruction set architecture, which can be licensed by any chip manufacturer, and embedded into SoC's for a fee.
In the offing is the new RISC-V architecture, which is an open source ISA, (32, 64 and 128bit instruction sets are defined) and is just beginning to appear in FPGA designs. As manufacturer's begin to produce RISC-V chips and SoC's, I think that the instruction set will be a bit more tractable than the Arm's, and compilers and tool chains will follow swiftly. This is a year or two off, however, and for now, Arm designs are predominant in the embedded space, but it may not be that way forever.
IMHO Cheers, Rob. On Fri, 25 Nov 2016, Haroon Khalid wrote:
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2016 09:45:02 -0700 From: Haroon Khalid <har...@sodacrunch.com> To: arm@openbsd.org Subject: OpenBSD developers view on ARM versus x86, ppc etc etc In general do most programmers consider ARM to be something cool to program for? Eg. compared to programming for older arch eg. x86 or PPC? Or does it not really matter? I only know basic high level programming so I still do not understand low-level programming. I just wanted to know with all the popularity of ARM, has anything changed or its pretty much the same? Is ARM completely open with OpenBSD developers can just make a phone call, email, or look up some general site to get going or is it hell getting info since there is still lots of control? Which is the easiest arch OpenBSD developers consider thats easily able to dev for? Which stands out? Thanks --Haroon
-- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Robert Sciuk r...@controlq.com 97 Village Rd. 289.312.1278 Wellesley, ON. N0B 2T0
