4 ms·

I sometime wonder if microchip/Soc wouldn't be better if we removed Wifi and USB kind of hardware support that are relying on enormous amount of (bloated) kerne

by julie1 11y ago

I sometime wonder if microchip/Soc wouldn't be better if we removed Wifi and USB kind of hardware support that are relying on enormous amount of (bloated) kernel code to perform magic. Embedded system for having a real purpose of studying and experimentation would rather need a core HF radio transmitter/receiver instead of wifi and the abstract layer for modulation/demodulation digital/physical layer should better be handled in the user space. USB could be replaced by other bus/hw link that have a simpler state machine and easier wire control. Ex: GPIB. USB and Wifi have to much states required to function simply. And seriously, just blitting operation (also usable in cryptography and matrix operations) should be enough to have a decent 2D CPU handling of graphics. Then, with an I2C bus you probably can pilot a chipset to just process the buffers at refresh time and either DAC or push them to a display. The complexity in the design reflects in the complexity of the code needed to handle it.

jschwartzi 11y ago
This kind of simpler design is available in modern SOCs. The thing is that most of the hobbyist boards are built with cell phone application processors because those devices support a wide variety of hobbyist use cases. If you look at evaluation kits for TI's Cortex R4 SOCs, for instance, those kits don't support USB because that's not the typical use case for an R4. It sounds like you're really looking for something with basic I2C and SPI support, which are fairly modern interfaces with simple state machines.
- julie1 11y ago
  I still think that FGPA should be thought in the perspective of building an ASIC. And that most ASIC should be thought like Keep It Simple Stupid device that have to handle state machine autonomously. Encapsulation of the abstraction begins at the HW level. I really don't like FSM handled by an external system.

by julie1 11y ago

jschwartzi 11y ago

This kind of simpler design is available in modern SOCs. The thing is that most of the hobbyist boards are built with cell phone application processors because those devices support a wide variety of hobbyist use cases. If you look at evaluation kits for TI's Cortex R4 SOCs, for instance, those kits don't support USB because that's not the typical use case for an R4. It sounds like you're really looking for something with basic I2C and SPI support, which are fairly modern interfaces with simple state machines.

julie1 11y ago
I still think that FGPA should be thought in the perspective of building an ASIC. And that most ASIC should be thought like Keep It Simple Stupid device that have to handle state machine autonomously. Encapsulation of the abstraction begins at the HW level. I really don't like FSM handled by an external system.