| | 19 | To generate a performance baseline hardware and base system needs to be selected. I have picked an ARM system for the profiling and the beagleboard in specific. The ARM architecture was picked as it is frequently used for mobile devices and future netbooks and that is the target for QtWebKit. The beagleboard was selected as it provides full access to the hardware (serial, JTAG), the tools are freely available (gcc, gdb, [http://openocd.berlios.de OpenOCD]), the Linux OMAP community has created good support for the SoC and is following mainline (in contrast to a horrible vendor port), the Cortex-A8 will be used in many future devices and the price of the beagleboard is quite low. One problem with the Cortex-A8 is that it might be too fast compared to previous ARM cores (e.g. VFP-3 fpu, Neon co-processor, bigger cache size, higher clock) but the above opportunities have outweightes this. |
