On Tue, November 13, 2012 9:39 pm, Xiaofan Chen wrote:
> Microchip licensed M14K core, does it include M14Kc core which is
> capable of running real Linux (with MMU)? It would certainly be
> interesting if Microchip goes to that market.

As I see it, a real MMU is a necessity, and with more complex applications
going on, an OS becomes a necessity, particularly in the respect to
housekeeping and scheduling functions. It is possible to program without
it, but development time and effort seems to grow exponentially.

A difficulty that goes along with increasing the memory and going to a
real MMU is that an external memory bus becomes necessary- it ceases to
become economic to put it all on one die. Once you pull the memory out of
the package, for fast chips, the signal integrity becomes a nightmare, and
you're using up precious I/O. Painful tradeoffs.

I expect Imagination to continue developing the MIPS cores- probably more
in the direction of communications and multimedia processing- as that is
what they already do, and processing requirements in that arena are sure
to increase. A particular core is not a magic recipe for success- success
lies in the effort put around the core. All chipmakers have to work with
the same lithography size limits.

Are there any reasonably priced (<$20US) single chip parts capable of
running a full Linux/Unix implementation? I know of the PIC32 efforts like
http://retrobsd.org/wiki/doku.php- I'm thinking more full scale
implementations (independent of the core).

Regards,

Matt Bennett
Just outside of Austin, TX
30.51,-97.91

The views I express are my own, not that of my employer, a large
multinational corporation that you are familiar with.
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