26 Oct
2011
26 Oct
'11
10:56 a.m.
On 10/26/2011 11:05 AM, David Riley wrote:
I think it's a highly subjective term you'll find a lot of people
arguing about. My gut-level definition is any computer that's
designed not to seem like a computer, which covers any number of
industrial control applications, consumer devices that aren't
computers (like the army of talking baby toys that are out now), etc.
I'd personally make the distinction between "embedded" and
"mobile"
when there's a screen attached.
Of course, where I find the lines blurry are things like the
application I mentioned, which was basically a bunch of processing
blades. The board (an AMC board, if anyone is familiar) was just a
2"x6" (roughly) board with a big-ass FPGA, a TI DSP (why they
insisted on that is anyone's guess) and the PowerPC for housekeeping.
It was primarily designated for processing satellite data, with the
FPGA doing the heavy DSP lifting and the DSP doing the cellular
signal processing.
So what do we call that? Maybe it's not embedded, but it's certainly
highly specialized hardware and software for a particular task (you
could use that board for any number of heavy compute tasks, but it
would make a terrible PC or generic server).
Yes, this is sorta the point I was trying to make in my earlier email
on this thread. We just sorta "know" whether something is "embedded"
(or a "minicomputer") or not; the lines aren't quite so sharp these days
as Chuck observed.
The problem is that I'm not sure what
"embedded" means any more.
Is a smartphone with a Cortex A15 4-core processor "embedded"?
How about an Android Pad?
The distinction is blurring pretty fast.
Putting full-blown UNIX computers in telephones doesn't change what
"embedded" has always meant, or at least implied. The system I'm
working on now is built around an ARM7 at 70MHz with 512KB of flash
and 32KB of RAM, and that's about as big as I go in the embedded
space. It doesn't have file-structured mass storage, nor does it
have a user interface in any traditional sense. THAT'S embedded. Just musing, anyway. I feel like going down this
taxonomy rabbit
hole is as much of a fool's errand as the "speed metal"/"thrash
metal"/etc. arguments we'd have in high school.
Yeah, it's a mess. We're famous for that particular type of mess on
this list. ;) People who have never stood in the same room with a
minicomputer before have argued about what constitutes one. Fun!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA