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Even your keyboard has a microcontroller in it. The subsystems in a PC used to be far more independent of the CPU: sound cards had features like wave table syn

by blihp 8y ago

Even your keyboard has a microcontroller in it. The subsystems in a PC used to be far more independent of the CPU: sound cards had features like wave table synthesis which could offload playback work from the CPU, SCSI disk controllers could do transfers between disks (after being initiated by the CPU), network adapters could do some basic packet inspection to see if your computer needed to bother processing an incoming packet etc. Moore's law, the drive for ever cheaper computers and some strategic moves on Intel's part eliminated most of that on the majority of PCs in the late 90's when we started seeing things like Winmodems, Winprinters (i.e. devices that couldn't function without a Windows driver on the PC doing most of the work turning the peripheral into a dumb I/O device) and USB. There are still many microcontrollers in a modern PC but they're buried at lower levels (instead of being in the hard drive controller they're now in the storage device itself, for example) and for different tasks.

pishpash 8y ago
Yes, it started with Winmodems, which people used to mock a lot. There used to be a fancy type of hardware modems called voice modems which even had sound card capabilities, and in turn sound cards had game ports that came standard.
lscotte 8y ago
Microcontroller is even a bit overstated or fuzzy these days. My keyboard and mouse each have ARM SOCs.
- blihp 8y ago
  How so? I would classify the ARM M0 (most likely what's in those devices) as a microcontroller-class device. Yes, it's a SOC... but so is the Atmel AVR and almost every other microcontroller these days. I tend to classify devices based on their use cases rather than specific hardware limits since it's a sliding scale over time. (i.e. today's 8-bit microcontrollers exceed what we had with 1980's-era 8-bit PCs on pretty much every front other than RAM... but they generally aren't considered anything more than microcontrollers today)

by blihp 8y ago

pishpash 8y ago

Yes, it started with Winmodems, which people used to mock a lot. There used to be a fancy type of hardware modems called voice modems which even had sound card capabilities, and in turn sound cards had game ports that came standard.

lscotte 8y ago

Microcontroller is even a bit overstated or fuzzy these days. My keyboard and mouse each have ARM SOCs.

blihp 8y ago
How so? I would classify the ARM M0 (most likely what's in those devices) as a microcontroller-class device. Yes, it's a SOC... but so is the Atmel AVR and almost every other microcontroller these days. I tend to classify devices based on their use cases rather than specific hardware limits since it's a sliding scale over time. (i.e. today's 8-bit microcontrollers exceed what we had with 1980's-era 8-bit PCs on pretty much every front other than RAM... but they generally aren't considered anything more than microcontrollers today)