7 May
2007
7 May
'07
1:56 a.m.
Patrick Finnegan wrote:
Richard seemed to be claiming that there was such a variety today of
commonly-availbe general-purpose CPUs (because of FPGAs), but maybe I
just mis-understood him.
I wish that were more true. FPGA's are pretty limiting, and most cpu's
tend to be very "riscy" with limited pipelining and small register
files.
but then again, there are a lot of 8 bit and PIC fpga designs out there,
as well as number of 16 bit designs, so there is some variety.
most tend (from what i've seen, which is not a lot) tend to be "direct
decode", i.e. no microcode with a tight register/alu pathway.
Most of what I see are commercial cpu's using licensed IP. I'd like to
see a lot more application specific micro sequencers, but that just
because I like microcode :-)
-brad