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Why do these systems have such tiny amounts of RAM? Every dinky little device seems to have a few megabytes of RAM, so it's kind of baffling to me how limited
by ianb 16y ago
Why do these systems have such tiny amounts of RAM? Every dinky little device seems to have a few megabytes of RAM, so it's kind of baffling to me how limited these hacker systems seem to be. Is there some important constraint I'm not understanding?
- angusgr 16y agoIf you're writing in C then 8kb is really quite a lot for many applications. The ATMEGA168P in the last-generation Arduino Duemilanove only had 1kb of RAM, and the ATMEGA328 in the current generation has 2kb. The attiny2313 only has 128 -bytes- of RAM! Even the Arduino environment actually uses more RAM than you'd consume just using plain avr-gcc, but AFAIK for most applications that's not an issue. The amount of flash (for code & static data) seems to be a more common concern in many cases. When you start managing dynamic runtime data structures, like in a VM or a full-blown operating system, then you really need the extra RAM. If you don't need it, then you're having it at the expense of cost, power consumption & (at the extreme end) size. That said, if you could buy an 8-bit AVR with 64kb of RAM then I would have bought it by now, just to play with Python. :P
- follower 16y agoIn these cases the RAM is in the same package as the CPU, whereas in "dinky little devices" it's most likely external to the CPU. (Insert a bunch of hand-wavy explanations about manufacturing volume, cost and power consumption here. :) ) Some of the AVR chips support external memory.