Thursday, December 27, 2007
Parallax Propeller
Christmas is such a wonderful time of contemplation of the Birth of Our Lord and shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. In keeping with this day of reflection, I did not begin playing with my brand new Propeller Education Kit until last night. I spent all day on a plane, or it would have been yesterday morning.
It is already evident that this chip from Parallax has a lot going for it.
To begin with, the Propeller chip, the Spin programming language, Propeller's assembly language, and the Propeller IDE were all designed by the same guy. Sacramento's genius-in-residence, Chip Gracey. Heh, Chip. And he makes chips. Anyhow, the thing has personality. Specifically, Chip Gracey's personality. And Chip Gracey is a genius, ergo...
But in addition to that personality, the chip has eight 32-bit cores. And it costs about a buck a core, depending upon how many you're needing (chips, not cores).
Wait, are you still reading?
I said EIGHT CORES.
Wow!
So, the eight cores are pretty fast (up to 80MHz), are strung together in an interesting way (all have simultaneous access to the 32 IO pins), and have a few little toys built-in (counters and timers). The resulting chip is small, even in the breadboard version that I'm using, and is said to be reasonably fault-tolerant. On top of all this, it runs cool and doesn't take much power.
I haven't done anything interesting with the chip yet, even though it's been twelve hours already, but I expect to be playing with it tonight. More later.
It is already evident that this chip from Parallax has a lot going for it.
To begin with, the Propeller chip, the Spin programming language, Propeller's assembly language, and the Propeller IDE were all designed by the same guy. Sacramento's genius-in-residence, Chip Gracey. Heh, Chip. And he makes chips. Anyhow, the thing has personality. Specifically, Chip Gracey's personality. And Chip Gracey is a genius, ergo...
But in addition to that personality, the chip has eight 32-bit cores. And it costs about a buck a core, depending upon how many you're needing (chips, not cores).
Wait, are you still reading?
I said EIGHT CORES.
Wow!
So, the eight cores are pretty fast (up to 80MHz), are strung together in an interesting way (all have simultaneous access to the 32 IO pins), and have a few little toys built-in (counters and timers). The resulting chip is small, even in the breadboard version that I'm using, and is said to be reasonably fault-tolerant. On top of all this, it runs cool and doesn't take much power.
I haven't done anything interesting with the chip yet, even though it's been twelve hours already, but I expect to be playing with it tonight. More later.
Labels: electronics, hobby, multicore, parallax, propeller
// posted by David @ 5:00 PM 
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