3 ms·
Then add a dollar to every microwave, washing machine, fridge, doorbell or other device with a hint of processing that uses a small embedded processor. Optimisi
by rkangel 8y ago
Then add a dollar to every microwave, washing machine, fridge, doorbell or other device with a hint of processing that uses a small embedded processor. Optimising transistor gate count for simplistic application is absolutely worth doing, even if you end up with an architecture that doesn't happen to be the same as expected by people who have only ever programmed for x86.
- oblio 8y agoThat's absolutely ridiculous. Don't tell me that if we really wanted to move 7 bit or whatever other wacky architectures to 8 bits, their price would go up by 1 dollar... x86 is far from the only 1 byte = 8 bits architecture... PowerPC, SPARC, Itanium, ARM, MIPS, heck, I'm having a hard time remembering major non 8 bit-multiple architectures.
- rkangel 8y agoI was exaggerating a little for effect, but not dramatically so, once you take the multiplicative effect between BOM cost and price on the shelf. To give you one example of a non-8 bit architecture, I used to work on CSR Bluetooth devices. For a while, the third most popular architecture was a little known thing called XAP, because it was in all of the 1-2 billion chips that CSR had made. XAP is a 16 bit processor in every way you can be a 16 bit processor: both the size of a byte (minimum addressable memory size) and the size of a word (size used for compilation) was 16 bit. You couldn't sub-address any larger types to serialise data. Also, the code space was separate from data space, and so function pointers were 24 bit (2 words). This meant that a lot of casting that developers take for granted wasn't possible (e.g. store a pointer in an int). All of these choices meant that the XAP was very low gate count, and so very power and cost efficient for a surprisingly capable little processor.