Well, sure, you need the right driver. You'll find it's pretty hard to boot up an ARM machine without any drivers, also. But look at the geode for example, it's an x86 with GPIOs that are supported in pretty much anything. They're a little more power hungry than the PI, but the real difference is that they tended to cost well over $100.
A few years ago the way you got an ARM development board was from the manufacturer, and they cost hundreds. The documentation was decent if you could afford it.
The pi is actually one of the less open designs out there, and is harder to make fully functional without binary blobs than some of its competitors. What it has is a community built around their stack. I'd actually much rather see less of these board-specific cults of personality and a more generic open architecture. There's nothing fundamentally different about a pi vs an arduino vs a beagle etc, but if you look at howtos you'll find one that's pi-specific and one that's arduino-specific for the same function.
It's called the galileo.
galileo is a failed product, they try to attach with arduino
.
I said what? build your own environment with many GPIO/i2c/spi, do not try to attach with arduino.
the other consideration, galileo is pricey, I remember was $100.
geode was my fav... no heatsink but...... low performance in cpu
..
No true, gpio on geode is limited only for GPIO, Not spi or i2c.
I had been involve to run embedded linux (prior rhel) on geode, webplayer/websurfer,
transmeta(gateway product).
last not least was low power AMD athlon
. this was the time when AMD was the king of x86.
as I said, build ARM dev is not costly. ARM got picked when mobile getting popular (poor MIPS
),
they cost $$ since they focus on customized product, they can did make $ to consumer but they did not.
pi is good on API and opesource, blob is ok as long as supported with API documentation.
if you look on chinese arm board, they do not publih blob api, and no update at all, mostly the performance are not acceptable, we need opensource or publish their blob(maintained) with API documentation.
No, totally different PI, arduino
PI is mini micrprocessor
arduino is microcontroller
if you started with 8051 , legacy of microcontroller and still used widely today
. and many clones. you will see differences on microprocessor versus microcontroller
simple rule is, microcontroler give you so many I/O compared with microprocessor. and very responsive on reading or writing since not much layer involved
rule of thumb, remote device candidate is microcontroller due on low power consumption and responsive on I/O. and cheap!! with only 8-32K ram, with 512K-8M flash plus extra 1M ROM.
I see simple explanation microprocessor(pi) versus arduino(microcontroller) ->
Raspberry Pi or Arduino? One Simple Rule to Choose the Right Board | Make: