Jinx wrote:
<snip>
> My feeling was that internally the PIC may be deficient in RAM. The maths
> haven't been done to approximate how much working room is needed. If
> an AVR with some external memory will do the job, then that's what we'd
> try.
>
> The other question is speed.  The person who asked is a programmer
> for a local ISP and knows how long ID takes on a secure web site (pretty
> quick, in human terms, eg for a credit card authentication), but he has no
> working knowledge of micros. His thought was to use an 'x86 chip, but I've
> suggested to him that would probably be impractical for the application he
> has in mind, so therefore micros are being looked at. I'd really like some
> ball-park idea of how long it would take to do this calculation. If it's
> going
> to take 20-30 seconds on even the fastest micro, the idea can't go ahead
> in its proposed form. It has to be reasonably comparable in time to an
> on-line verification

Could you do this on a PC-104 (or $$ Tiqit) or other small 80x86 SBC,
perhaps?  Not as cheap as a PIC, but (for some SBC's) quite cheap (For
example in 1000's the http://www.star.net/people/~mvs/ 3"x4" Mini PC is
$27, $95 for an Eval kit.)  I, too, wish the PICs had about 16k of RAM
<G>  (AT90S8515's do interface to SRAM reasonably easily.)

  Mark

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