I was looking up comparison tables of spec, MIPS, DMIPS and BogoMIPS figures for various architectures, and wanted to see where do the ARM7 ARM9 and Xscale stand.
People were using Linux on the 386 at 25MHz which would be roughly
10MIPS, roughly 1/6th of the current ARM7 microcontrollers. Of course they were helped with the FPU, external cache, DMA and so on and the comparison is not direct but very general.
I wanted to see if a 60MHz basic ARM7TDMI is comparable to a 486DX4 or a Pentium1 at 66MHz. The older HyperSPARC chips seem similar to the ARM7 in mips per MHz, in having 3 pipelines and in its cache, and at
33MHz it would run the solaris of the day. Building a minimalist system on ARM7 with a really stripped down Linux should be feasible (I know ARM9 would be more appropriate). I know there are plenty of Linux ports for almost all ARM7 microcontrollers with an external bus, but I wonder if such a system with the right LCD and keyboard could be used as a general expandable system. That depends on its performance.