The easiest way to test ARM specific codes on windows

Question

I would like to write an ARM SIMD computer vision code on an intel based windows machine. I would like to know what are the different options for doing that. I know for example that I can run a rasperrpi-emulator on windows, but that's really slow, and not productive. I hope if for example there is an IDE like Visuatl C++ that compiles code for ARM and test it like I'm exactly on an ARM platform without buying a real ARM board CPU.

Is it the only way to achieve that to buy an ARM based board ?

If I'm going to use an Emulator like QEMU, is there a faster or elegant way to develop computer vision software on it ?

I'm targeting ARM11 CPUs, that are quad-cores,..etc. Not the old ARM Architecture like M Series or ARM7.

Answer 1

By far, your best bet in terms of shortening your test-debug-compile cycle will be buying an ARM board and just programming natively on it or will a cross-compiler. I have had good luck with Gumstix, which generally are able to take a Linux distro pretty easily. From there, you have all of your GNU tools and you can just program directly on it.

Answer 2

Answer depends on what you really have as "ARM SIMD" code baseline. Normally ARM SIMD = NEON SIMD extensions.

If this is the case and your NEON codebase is written using NEON intrinsics, then you can try recently introduced "automated porting NEON -> SSE solution", posted by Intel here.

Looks like easy to use: just include NEONtoSSE.h to your code and re-compile (I expect various C/C++ compilers compatibility).