Subject:
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Re: legOS
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Tue, 1 Dec 1998 07:09:24 GMT
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Reply-To:
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brett@NOMORESPAMsr.hp.com
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Viewed:
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2687 times
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Paul Speed wrote:
> ... where is the line between firmware and microcode drawn?
> Or is microcode also considered firmware?
I'm not going to touch the legal issues being talked about, but let me
try to address the technical ones.
A micro-processor (CPU) is composed of a bunch of registers, adders,
buffers, memory I/O locations, etc. In order for anything to take
place, bit patterns (representing data) needs to be moved around thru
these parts. A data value must be moved from memory (whos address must
be computed) and into a register. This must be repeated for a second
value. Then they must be sent thru the adder and back into a third
memory location. Thus you have A = B + C.
It is the responsibility of the microcode to handle all that.
The next level up would be the firmware. This is software written in an
assembled or compiled language (compiled into microcode instructions)
that do the work of talking to the keyboard, display, disk drive etc.
When you turn a machine on, it's the firmware (in the form of a
bootstrap program) that gets things going so that the machine will
respond.
At some point the firmware will load some kind of an operating system
(OS). On some simple machines the firmware and OS may be the same
thing. But for something like a PC the OS is the environment in which
software can be run to do useful work (DOS, Windows '95, etc).
The final (for this discussion) level is the software application. This
is your Doom game or spreadsheet or whatever.
It's ALL software. The difference is what level of abstraction from the
underlying hardware each operates in, and what media it resides on.
I could go on, but I've probably already put half of you to sleep...
:-)
--
Brett Carver
brett@sr.hp.com
(707) 577-4344
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: legOS
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| (...) Interesting. I view the actual chip implementation as software as well. Having seen a number of chips being built from scratch (like 3), and seeing the simulators for these chips run, then seeing the chip production source code (which is a lot (...) (26 years ago, 1-Dec-98, to lugnet.robotics)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: legOS
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| Just curious, and since you seem to have some information handy, where is the line between firmware and microcode drawn? Or is microcode also considered firmware? -Paul (...) (26 years ago, 30-Nov-98, to lugnet.robotics)
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