randomvibe:
Grumpy_Mike:
Yes it can, just watch me.Just for the sake of argument, if this multi-processor chip was made by ATMEL, would an Arduino board for it be worthwhile?
No not at all. The fact that there was an ATMEL chip in the arduino put me off investigating the board for about two years. I a previous job I had had a lot of trouble with ATMEL flash and I was not impressed with they way they tested it in the factory or the real rewrite specification as opposed to what was put on paper. This was for a company that was looking to purchase a million parts so due diligence was required, they failed badly. So I never have been a great fan of ATMEL.
I did look at the propeller and bought a few processors and development boards because the sounded very attractive. However I found the software environment and language quite poor and what rankerd was that every time you wanted a peripheral bang goes a core. So a simple UART consumed a core, an SPI or I2C consumed another core and by the time you had finished most of the multi-core advantage had evaporated.
One of the strengths of the Arduno is the library system and the third party libraries. These do not port well, as we have seen with other processor variants of the Arduino, when they address the underlying hardware of the processor directly.
I could have sworn that RPi would not have been as successful as it has been
Yes that has been quite a surprise but it was offering something that the Arduino did not, and not many people understand the concept of "real time". It appealed to the Linux crew who would rather install stuff than actually code anything. Also the price range and the fact that it could look like a "real" computer boosted it's popularity.
Mind you the number of people who have told be that they have one but have never used it because they can't work out what to do with it are legend. Still it helps sell my books. 