| ??? 11/13/08 06:56 Read: times |
#160005 - It would not be Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Per Westermark said:
Until they find a way to put, say, 64 TB or so of ram on a chip, someone will always complain that he needs "more core." The most likely reason for someone to put 64TB of RAM on a chip would be to allow it to run the next-next version of Windows. But the problem is of course that if they let this fact out to M$, then the next-next version of Windows will no longer fit in 64 TB since M$ likes to "consume" a hardware way before someone actually sells it. The goal on a small microcontroller is not to run a multiuser multitasking OS, but, rather to make it possible ot use whatever language the programmer wishes, and to be as wasteful as he/she wishes. TO make sure that there's enough in the way of resources so the current-generation of programmers can blink a LED, which we old-timers easily did with a part that had only 1 KB of on-chip program memory and 64 bytes of read/write memory, and which, in fact, were even then programmed in PL/M ... <sigh> ... rather than ASM ... Certainly, with an 805x, the full complement of RAM, i.e. 64KB would be enough to have on-chip, but it would have to be accessible from without without hindering the operation of the MCU. The 64TB limit simply came to mind because that was proposed as the upper limit for the i386 and above, including virtual memory. Programmers probably would want that much in code space, too, so that would imply, already, 128TB. It's not Microsoft that wastes computer resources, it's programmers in general. Rare, nowadays, is the programmer who could take a 1702 (256 bytes) a couple of 2112's (256 nybbles each) and a 2.5 MHz Z80 and produce a fully functional monitor program. In the mid-'70's that's what you had ... no matter which CPU was being used. We were all grateful for the 2102, which gave us 1Kx1 and somewhat later, the 2708 ... Ask someone to write a complete control program for a data terminal, using an 8-bitter at about 2 MHz and 1KB of ROM + 1 kB of RAM (not counting the video refresh RAM). I've got three old terminals that use just exactly that. I'll bet that code wasn't created in C++ or Java! They still work better (more dependably) than the PC, too! RE |
