Are there any ports or plans to port to the Freescale Coldfire 54455 processor?
Maybe not the best (or only) place to ask, if you’re after anything more than the forum’s contributors and GHI’s thoughts (even those may be tempered by GHI’s ability to say things in public). You may want to post on the netmf forum to see if anyone else is specifically working on such a port.
Thank you for the info.
Although NETMF has a robust porting kit that can easily be extended to support new processor families, in practice, NETMF hardware out there usually runs on ARM processors – mostly either on newer Cortex microcontrollers or older ARM7/9 non-Cortex cores.
ColdFire processors have great performance, but seeing as how they don’t use an ARM core, I highly doubt anyone would be interested in porting it – it’d be a huge undertaking, and I’m not sure what the advantages would be over existing ports that are already stable and in use in production environments.
Plus, the processors are quite pricey. The ColdFire 54455 that you mentioned is $30/unit in single quantities The new G400, for example, uses an AT91SAM9X35 which has significantly better performance than the ColdFire and costs half the price.
It would definitely be a huge undertaking, but the benefits would be things like multiple ethernet MACs, ATA and PCI busses for peripherals and storage.
Yeah, but if you’re designing an embedded system around PCI peripherals, NETMF is totally not for you. Just to meet the timing requirements, everything you do will have to be DMA-transferred. If you want to actually do anything with that data, you’ll obviously have to do that in C – and the code would be extremely dirty and highly specific to your application (you don’t have time to have some lovely API – you’ll get killed by functional call recursion).
And your processor will be so busy running your application-specific C code, I doubt it’d have much time left to run TinyCLR. And even if it did, it’s not like any of your managed code would be anywhere fast enough to interact with the data in any way, shape, or form.
Point is, a ColdFire NETMF port would never be able to support any of those peripherals you mentioned.
So, it’d basically just be another FEZ Hydra-class device.
Meh.