I'm somewhat interested in using the Rabbit 3000 in a product. However, I need to compare performance against an ARM chip which is only a little more expensive, and decide if it's worth the effort. I
*really* don't want to spend the money on a development kit which I might never use again after this one test.My benchmarking applet is an embedding-tweaked port of the JPEG6B reference library, with a custom memory manager and an embedded piece of representative image data so a filesystem isn't required to run the test. What I'd like is for some kind person to turn on whatever speed optimizations the Dynamic C compiler offers, build and upload the code, and measure the time between printf("start\n"); and printf("stop\n");. This test is macroscopic enough that a stopwatch time estimate is more than adequate. What I'm looking for here is the difference between three seconds, ten seconds, or thirty seconds, and it's a test of the compiler's view of my code as much as the core.
The advantages I'm seeking in Rabbit are slightly (VERY slightly) lower cost, slightly simpler board layout, lower power requirement and an easier EMC pass, since this appliance must get FCC/CE/UL if it's to be saleable.
By the way, if the response to my posting is "Dynamic C won't compile the JPEG reference sources without extensive tweaking" then thank you
- that's what I needed to know - Rabbit is out of the question in that case!
If you'd be willing to help me out, then please either post here or email. I need a couple of days to get my sample app pruned enough (it's an excerpt from an old piece of firmware that is still quite jealously guarded), and then we can begin.
BTW, I'd also be interested to know if anyone is trying to maintain a project that shares common code modules between a Rabbit device and an "other" device whose firmware is built with gcc. As far as possible, I'd like to keep this new device sharing code with existing products, and all our existing products are built with gcc.