There's been quite a bit of discussion about the iPIC on Slashdot.  Since
the inventor uses a large ROM in addition to the PIC, some suspect he's
using a forth-like token interpreter.  Still, running at 4MHz and
bit-banging 115200 bps, he's got about 8 instructions per bit.  Pretty
tight...  Although I guess he doesn't need to do any TCP/IP stuff in
there.  He can have some latency while he process the packet, then just
feed from ROM out to his "router."

The guy's port numbers seem to map to offsets in ROM at which the pages
begin.  With an earlier version of his software, one could get pages to
load from the middle by using strange port numbers.

I'll be interested to see what comes of this...

jason harris




Ben Stragnell Claims That:

>There's no way that the guy you're referring to has implemented TCP in
>under 100 instructions. Not any meaningful form of TCP, anyway. However,
>he states categorically that his stack is fully RFC compliant. Frankly,
>there are enough suspicious aspects about this guy's claims that I'm
>pretty much convinced it's bullshit, or there's some massive catch. If
>it's the former, I'm a bit bemused as to his motives... it's not even
>funny, as hoaxes go.