Once upon a time, all programming was bare metal programming. You coded to the processor core, you took care of memory, and no operating system got in your way. Over time, as computer programmers, users, and designers got more sophisticated and as more clock cycles and memory bytes became available, more and more layers were added between the programmer and the computer. However, I have recently spotted what might seem like a trend away from ever-thicker software stacks, in the interest of performance and, in particular, latency.
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Wind River Blog: 80186 and 8051
Wind River recently added a couple of new processor models to Simics: the 30-year-old 80186 and the 32-year-old 8051.
I have a blog post about this up on the Wind River tools blog. Pretty amazing to see us model an eight bit machine in 2012 – just proves how long-lived some hardware systems are.
Wind River Blog: Crystal Forest on Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about Simics running a model of the new Intel Crystal Forest platform. Crystal Forest is a very complex piece of hardware, but I am pretty happy that we managed to demo it in an understandable way – by essentially using it as a black box and putting a pretty display on top of that (using Eclipse).