"Paulo Pinto" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > > But he is in a way right. > > Even the small embedded systems are slowly becoming multicore. The most > recent ARM processors are now multicore. >
Yes, because after all, who *doesn't* need to decode genomes on their telephone? ;) > As an example of a multicore PIC, see the Parallax Propeller processor, > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller. > Warning to all: The following two paragraphs may sound very strange considering they're coming from me... The Propeller's awesome. Brilliant little chip. Not exactly a big fan of SPIN or the IDE, though (Personally, I would just as soon have spared the silicon used to embed that SPIN interpreter into the chip, or maybe repurposed it somehow). And the video output capabilities could be a little bit better. But those niggles aside, I admit, I'm a big fan of the Propeller. And the whole "multi-core microcontroller", believe it or not, is probably the main reason why. It's a cheap little thing and in terms of power, I'd estimate it to be...as if you had a device somewhere between an NES or SNES, but made the A/V circuitry almost entirely re-programmable. I was actually lucky enough to have the opportunity to play with a Propeller on an early revision of the Hydra board ( www.xgamestation.com ) before either of their official releases. Still have the board right here on my desk, too: https://www.semitwist.com/download/img/Hydra-v0.1.jpg Although as you can see it's gathered...ummm...more than a little bit of dust since I've been drowning in the web world for so long now :/ (Actually, I'm kind of embarrassed by all the dust on it...I really should have covered it long ago...) I wrote the sound and eeprom drivers that come with the Hydra, and three of the demos: Hydra Rally, Deep Cavern 3D, and Piano Demo. (They're shown in a random rotation on the xgamestation homepage, reload the page a few times to see them all). It was a lot of exhausting work, but I had an absolute blast developing them. I love working with systems where you have full control and understanding over every single byte - especially when it's to the end of making games. Unfortunately I never really get the chance for such things anymore. > > Sure there will still be lots of scenarios where this won't be the case, > like there are still 8 bit PIC processors being deployed in Assembly, but > they are niche products. The vast majority of the developers will have the > reality he describes. > > -- > Paulo
