Re:Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32
by rvense on Thursday July 25, 2024 @02:21PM
(#41071707)
I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate how fast a modern "microcontroller" is. That 'H735 is probably faster than every computer I had up to and including the iBook G4 I until early 2009.
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I keep running into that also. It's like the common mental model of a microcontroller froze around Y2K as a sort of headless VIC-20. I had an FAE, and a good one, from a major supplier tell me "you can't implement a filter" on a low-end micro that was roughly as powerful as an early nineties DSP.
Cortex-Ms, man. A lot of 'em you just give 3.3V and a couple of bypass caps, and GCC will use the single-cycle hardware MAC (for M4 and above) if you just write the straight-forward C code and you can put it on there in 600ms with DFU. I'm a hobbyist, not an embedded wizard, but it really seems *pretty* good compared to what I understand about the old days.
(Like I like retro stuff and during COVID I bought an old DSP56k dev board with a book about the assembly language but oh boy, oh dear)
They're amazing. And - you can run a PC emulator on an ESP32. Sure, you need the fancy ram. OK. And then people will tell me an ESP32 can't do things that people definitely were doing on bare-bones PCs in the eighties.