4 ms·
You can get several kinds of guarantees out of these combinations: the microcontroller gives you an environment suitabke for guaranteed timings (not just latenc
by gmueckl 8y ago
You can get several kinds of guarantees out of these combinations: the microcontroller gives you an environment suitabke for guaranteed timings (not just latency), but also a seperate domain to isolate your software in. So stuff like highly safety critical code goes into the microcontoller (e.g. tight monitoring and control loops) while the complex application fluff (UI, networking, bells and whistles) goes on the main CPU with a big, convenient OS to develop on. And both parts can barely influence each other in unintended ways.
There are a lot of boards on the embedded systems market that use e.g. ARMs big.LITTLE architecture for that.
- wtracy 8y agoSorry, I misunderstood the question to mean, "What is the advantage to having the microcontroller on the CPU die, as opposed to having separate chips on the same board."
- gmueckl 8y agoThere are software side advantages as the interconnect between the two can be very different from bus interface like SPI or I2C. Some of these systems offer shared memory between the cores, for example.