i am looking at the arm microprocessor. i have read extensive reports on it, and have decided it to be right for me, but i have questions like usual. i was wondering first off if it can decode mp3’s and if not is there a chip that can decode mp3’s and is compatible. and my other question is which platform should i go for, what i want it to be is fast and more power than i need so i have room for extensive and sometimes messy coding. i want to make something like a pda only i want it to have wireless communication that can link up to various systems in my car, garage, house, and eventually my fully automated green house, so i want power and speed to do this and not have to wait long for it to think, 1 milisecond is usually to long for me JK
I tested various ARM based micro controllers, the STM32 is, by far, the fastest one (it uses an ARM Cortex-M3), at equal clock it is faster than an LPC2148 an much faster than an AT91SAM7X (both using the ARM7TDMI). It also can clock much higher, 72MHz vs 60 and 55 MHz.
The Cortex-M3 also has a much better interrupt handling architecture.
If you need something even faster you should go for something with an ARM9. If you are interested I can post my benchmarks.
Madplay on 206MHz StrongArm 1110 (ARMv4) decodes 320kbps MP3s at 20% of real time to /dev/null.
So if you can fit the 46kB lookup tables plus the code into flash, it may be possible to use a STM32.
If you don’t care about a few bucks, take a look at the VLSI VS10xx chips.
SparkFun sells some of them, but unfortunately not the best one VS1053.