µctrl Raspberryπ pico & arduino

[ijabbott]

(01-27-2021 09:56 PM)Liam Hays Wrote:  I remember once seeing a chess game that ran entirely in ARM assembly on a Pi, and like you say, it could boot in a fraction of a second. For a calculator, that's fine (look at the 48---every time I turn mine on, the screen flashes for about that long). That makes me wonder how power consumption is, between Linux and a dedicated program, on a Pi Zero.

For comparison, a TI Nspire CX calculator takes about a minute to boot up if it hasn't been turned on for a while!

Liam Hays Wrote:I also thought of something else: the M0-based RP2040, as well as the ESP32, don't have hardware floating point support. I don't know about a Pi, but they're fast enough that I suspect software floating point, if needed, would not create tremendous overhead.

I think Casio had custom versions of the Hitachi SuperH (now Renesas SuperH) CPUs produced without hardware floating point for their graphing calculators, because the hardware floating point unit worked in binary, but the calculator worked in decimal (like most calculators).