To: frank{at}katestone.com.au, atm{at}shore.net
From: mdholm{at}telerama.com
Reply-To: mdholm{at}telerama.com


Frank Q wrote:

>With today's modern processors, does anyone really have to worry about
>speed?
>And memory is also inexpensive, so why worry about squeezing the most from
>your EEPROMS?

Well, if you are trying to keep cost, and especially power consumption
down, you are more limited.  When you want to get several hours of running
out of one set of flashlight batteries, you have to watch those milliwatts.
 The fast processors with mucho memory work pretty well as handwarmers on
those cold observing nights.  Some of the fast Pentiums and their clones
can pretty nearly be used to cook your Thanksgiving turkey.

Also, the general purpose operating systems can be really lousy for real
time control.  Now I think the proposal that started this thread was
envisioning pretty smart stepper controllers being run by a cpu that really
doesn't have a lot to do.  Thus one could save those milliwatts at the cpu
and memory level and use a few more at the stepper controllers.


Mark Holm
mdholm{at}telerama.com

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