Raspberry Pi

"The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video ...

contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700MHz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries ...

The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode. The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.

That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.

We recommend Debian [Linux] as our default distribution"

www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

So it sounds like DS5 would probably be the most appropriate toolset:

"The Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) is an easy to use development environment for creating, debugging, and optimizing Linux and Android systems running on ARM processor-based platforms"

http://www.keil.com/arm/arm.asp

http://www.arm.com/ds5

"The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video ...

contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700MHz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries ...

The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode. The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.

That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.

We recommend Debian [Linux] as our default distribution"

www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

So it sounds like DS5 would probably be the most appropriate toolset:

"The Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) is an easy to use development environment for creating, debugging, and optimizing Linux and Android systems running on ARM processor-based platforms"

http://www.keil.com/arm/arm.asp

http://www.arm.com/ds5

The goals of the Raspberry Pi include the desire to encourage thinking, experimentation and imagination.

With a £30(ish) board, SD card and PSU you can do a fair bit.

It would be worth you checking the RaspberryPi forum:

www.raspberrypi.org/.../

I seem to remember seeing at least one post there that spoke of the construction of a boot block for an SD card. That block could almost certainly be written in assembler, so this might be a nice start for you.

Good luck.

ps You might also find the Raspberry Pi forum more amenable to your questions, thoughts and ideas concerning the Pi.

Anybody interested in real bare metal Pi development can look at this great series of tuts

www.cl.cam.ac.uk/.../