chPropello: turning an 8 bit into a 32 bit CPU

[chris]

In my series



I wrote a little emulator for an Atmega32 microcontroller which emulates some instructions of the parallax propeller cpu. This cpu has 8 cores with 32 bits and can achieve 160Mips.

V0.2:
The emulation is a little bit slower ( about 3 order of magnitude ).

But .. it can run on an Atmega32 and blink a led

V0.3
Now running 4 Cogs. The memory of each cog had to be limited to 64 longs because the Atmega32 has only 2KByte of Ram.

[chris]

[chris]

There is a very interesting 32 bit CPU, which could be emulated with very little C-Code:



It has a "stack based" architecture which means that implementing this core on an FPGA would need very little resources, because no register bank is needed.
The big advantage of the ZPU core is that there seems to be a GCC port.
There is a little trade: The processing speed is very slow and compared to the propeller design it is only "single core"

[chris]

There are more people running 32 bit processors on 8 bit processors.

ARM on a Attiny85:
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/17/emulatin ... 8-pin-avr/
http://dmitry.co/index.php?p=./04.Thoughts/08.%20uM0

Atmega running Linux:
http://hackaday.com/2012/03/28/building ... x-pc-ever/