Subject: Re: NetBSD without MMU ?
To: None <tech-embed@netbsd.org, netbsd-ports@netbsd.org, tech-ports@netbsd.org>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
List: tech-embed
Date: 04/13/2002 13:26:00
[ On Friday, April 12, 2002 at 12:53:20 (-0700), John Clark wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: NetBSD without MMU ?
>
> but say the MMU part is $10 US more than the unMMU part and one has a
> $10 M savings which could justify the additional development costs for 

That's about three orders of magnitude more money than the original example.
Hardly a fair comparison!

Also note that the original example was considering price points for
marketplace success.  Sometimes a very few pennies difference in the
price can make differences of many orders of magnitude for units sold.
Unfortunately bean counters always seem to want to try to get those
pennies from production costs, not from future profits.

In the real world I'll bet you'll find people writing code in VB or
something horrible like that for the first "release" and then for the
sake of the markeplace you hope they replace their platform with
something more reasonable and do some better engineering for the next
release....  (Actually I don't have to bet -- though I wouldn't even
admit to knowing anyone doing things that way, I see it already in all
the trade rags and catalogues for embedded systems!  :-)

So, what's the cheapest processor with full MMU support, available in
any quantity today and in the forseable future, that NetBSD runs on
today?

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods@acm.org>;  <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;  <woods@robohack.ca>
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