With a ton of testing behind us, we've pushed on to the second round of Buffee boards and have officially submitted the order for sixty beta Buffees. While we had hoped that the alpha version would just work, we were not so lucky and Buffee v0.5 has a new little friend – a GreenPAK SPLD (Simple Programmable Logic Device) and we've ensured that on this version every signal that is not bound to the SPLD, is bound to the PRU (Programmable Realtime Unit) which is almost as good as the SPLD, just not quite as fast. This doesn't mean the alpha boards are useless though!

In the last part of the series we put PJIT up against the state-of-the-art 68000 emulator for ARM that used the traditional interpreter style of emulation, Cyclone 68000, and found PJIT to be rather compelling. But one cannot ignore the raw performance of a true JIT.

Just a small update; we've been working hard at getting the core of PJIT ready to boot up before receiving our first batch of boards. Getting the AM3358 up and running without the benefit of JTAG has been … interesting. To date we have:

• working clock reconfiguration
• set up of all the caches and mmu
• a timer by which we can measure performance
• our first runs of PJIT with the BogoMIPS test

Ooh it's been a busy month! But we have our first boards in ready to get all populated. We did have one small snafu with the wrong footprint for our Flash memory that might put us a little behind schedule, but nothing world-ending. Despite this, I think this looks really good for our first, officialy production boards.