Selection of RISC architecture

[r31griffo]

G'day everyone,

I'm new to the RISC scene, recently playing around with a Marvell Sheevaplug which was way too powerful for the projects I was playing with:
Email server/webserver
bluetooth pager/mobile phone advertising
(Next I'm just going to add a USB VGA card to it and use it as a carputer)

What it did do however was get me hooked on more efficient ways of providing services on a network using headless embedded devices.

I've been looking for a new board for my next project, a firewall/proxy/web/email server. But there is so many selections on the market when it comes to RISC architecture...ARM, PPC, MIPS appear to be the most commonly available.

Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to choosing architecture? Is there a comparison chart for architecture and clock rates to "computing power"?

Cheers,

Griffo

[Rubberman]

Price, performance, capabilities. Decide what you need in those regards, and then choose a board that meets the requirements. I have found 64MB ARM9 boards that boot from SD cards which have A/D I/O, multiple USB ports, ethernet, and multiple RS-232 ports in a PC-104 form factor that cost about $100 USD in quantity. They run Debian Linux w/ 2.6 kernels and boot in about 1.2 seconds from SD card. You can also get models with embedded flash if you don't want to boot from external media like that. ARM seems to be a popular architecture these days - Android cell phones run on that.

[r31griffo]

Thanks for your reply.

Price, performance, capabilities.

The performance part is what I'm trying to figure out, is there some kind of architecture comparison chart for "computing power"?
eg, PowerPC vs ARM vs MIPS

I have found 64MB ARM9 boards that boot from SD cards which have A/D I/O, multiple USB ports, ethernet, and multiple RS-232 ports in a PC-104 form factor that cost about $100 USD in quantity. They run Debian Linux w/ 2.6 kernels and boot in about 1.2 seconds from SD card.

1.2 seconds, that is impressive! I imagine they wouldn't be utilizing udev?

[Rubberman]

1.2 seconds, that is impressive! I imagine they wouldn't be utilizing udev?

Not sure. I'll be digging into the kernel configuration this week so I'll find out for you. It's pretty vanilla Debian Etch with kernel 2.6.21. Not latest, but not antique either.