Embedded Systems
Electronegativity
Posts: 311
I just spent about a week looking into embedded processors, and it seems like the Propeller could be very competitive in this market.
The hottest thing out there is the Intel PXA270, which can crank out 520 MHz for only a few hundred milliamps of current.
On the down side, you can't touch a development board for under $450, and the chip itself has hundreds of pins in a fine pitch ball grid array. If you want to program it with a Microsoft embedded OS it costs $1000 for the software tools and another $90 per device in licensing fees. Embedded Linux and QNX are more affordable, but writing your own drivers for an X86 based CPU can be a formidable task.
In exchange for being a little slower, the Propeller is more affordable, easier to use, requires a lower part count per board, and comes with unprecedented tech support.
The only major drawback of the current line of parts is a paucity of pins, but once the 64 pin version is available it will be a viable choice for a wide range of handheld devices.
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I wonder if this wire is hot...
The hottest thing out there is the Intel PXA270, which can crank out 520 MHz for only a few hundred milliamps of current.
On the down side, you can't touch a development board for under $450, and the chip itself has hundreds of pins in a fine pitch ball grid array. If you want to program it with a Microsoft embedded OS it costs $1000 for the software tools and another $90 per device in licensing fees. Embedded Linux and QNX are more affordable, but writing your own drivers for an X86 based CPU can be a formidable task.
In exchange for being a little slower, the Propeller is more affordable, easier to use, requires a lower part count per board, and comes with unprecedented tech support.
The only major drawback of the current line of parts is a paucity of pins, but once the 64 pin version is available it will be a viable choice for a wide range of handheld devices.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
I wonder if this wire is hot...
Comments
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
Memory interface takes quite a few pins if you don't want it to run like grandma snail.
A decent LCD display has 18 pins for parallel data, vertical and horizontal sync, a clock input, and a few other assorted inputs.
How about a PCI bus for example.
Some kind of user input interface is usually appreciated as well.
In my particular case I have been toying with the idea of making a custom GPU out of an FPGA, with the Propeller running a game engine and handling user input. They would both have to be on the same bus as the system memory, with more pins equaling greater bandwidth and faster memory access.
The Xgame people are doing wonders with Parallax hardware, but the apps they are showing off for the Hydra are still mostly stuck in the second dimension. The Propeller is fast enough to implement ray tracing algorithms but with only 32 pins the memory access bottleneck becomes prohibitive.
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I wonder if this wire is hot...
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
How about a super pinball machine?
How about a spacecraft robot like the Mars Rover? Low current operation, speed and parallel processing when needed. Lots of tasks to manage. I bet Propeller could handle it.
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Tracy Allen
www.emesystems.com
We're all dreamers here, and I'm no exception, but what I meant was to implement ray tracing on an FPGA.
The Propeller would run the game engine, report the current state to system memory, and indicate that its work was done.
After that the FPGA would perform the ray tracing and write the next frame to an LCD.
Once the Propeller dropped off the current state of affairs it would be free to resume game-related calculations.
What I posted was somewhat different than this, but I guess I was thinking back to the early days of playing DOOM on a 33 MHz 386 with 4 Meg of RAM before video cards even existed. It ran well enough to get me addicted and the propeller could walk all over that old beast with its 32 legs.
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I wonder if this wire is hot...
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
The MIPS work out, the assembly math is there, it'll happen.
Now where did I put Abrash's Graphics Black Book...
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, & pfpp