FYI, in the Microprocessor Report that came out yesterday,
there is an interesting item about the company TeraGen,
which I hadn't before heard of. Their website is at
http://www.tera-gen.com, and it has links on the home
page only for "Technology" and "Product Concepts", but no
"Products" as yet. They are supposed to be working on
a generic, reconfigurable processor that uses a VLIW RISC
instruction set, and several "microthread engines".
Each engine can be allocated to core processing or peripheral
duties, and will run at 200-250 MHz. At those speeds,
supposedly, a single "microthread" can emulate, say,
a UART or timer at about the same capacity as the peripheral
on a 5MHz microcontroller. Thus, the more microthreads on
the chip, the more perhiperhals it can handle. Supposedly
the first units are planned to emulate an 8051, but
it says that pretty much any architecture could be emulated.

Neat stuff.

--Bob

--
============================================================
Bob Drzyzgula                             It's not a problem
bob@drzyzgula.org                until something bad happens
============================================================