mch@SCOTLAND.CAMELOT.CS.CMU.EDU (Mark Hahn) (02/28/88)
I think most of the comments on my wishlist were way off. If you want a
generic, all-on-one motherboard, buy a damned 386 clone! What's the idea
here? Reinvent the wire-spoked wheel? You are going to end up with a
Caddilac, with similar efficiency.
Instead, go for (ooh, aah,) object-oriented modularity. The value of
object-orientation is not just that design is simplified by untangling,
but that once you choose decent object boundaries, you can specialize
(read, "gain efficiency") within them.
So build a processing engine, and a serial IO engine, and a
choose-your-favorite-parallel-bus-standard engine for stuff like hard disks
and a video processor (but stick it on the other side of dual-ported ram!)
I think an imbedded microcontroller beats out a uart, simply because it
allows the real processor to do its job, rather than messing around with
buffers and escape characters. Science can fuse tobacco and potato plants,
but so what? The same goes for an all-in-one board.
____
Mark
--
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