4 ms·
The clearest distinction today is the lack of an MMU. That's just a useful metric to go by that neatly divides SoCs into "things intended to run bare metal/RTOS
by marcan_42 5y ago
The clearest distinction today is the lack of an MMU. That's just a useful metric to go by that neatly divides SoCs into "things intended to run bare metal/RTOS code" and "things intended to run Linux", that are two different product groups with significant differences.
Obviously this wasn't always the case, e.g. a good 15+ years ago I put ucLinux on an old ISP router I had lying around for fun, and it was an ARM946 without an MMU. But that class of device no longer exists today for all practical purposes, and so it's easy to use the existence of an MMU to decide what to call them.
The 8086 may have been a microprocessor, and so was the 80186, but you know where you find 80186 cores today? Microcontrollers. Specifically, some video processing chip manufacturers (e.g. stuff that goes into monitors and DP-HDMI adapters) seem to like using V186 cores still.