Isn't Propeller bit problematic from educational point of view because it's design is so unique that knowledge from it is not so readily transferrable to mainstream hardware?
I learned a ton on it and would not say that is true.
And the P2 chip can put all that to bed due to it literally supporting almost every computing model and can even do multiple language programs that run all at the same time!
I have written programs that are SPIN, C, assembly and BASIC. Compile, run, and there it is! All running together, concurrently.
One can write parallel algorithms, concurrent ones, or just do sequential compute too.
Yes, the design is unique, but what one learns can be applied broadly.
One does wish more would work as easily and be performant, but that is a minor league problem.
My ability to use just about anything else is now very significantly improved.
Yeah, I would easily call the P2 chip the Amiga of Microcontrollers.
The thing is a playground, but also at the same time more effective than one might expect at first glance.
Video options are improved too. There is a color engine capable of mapping colors into color spaces. Say you want green and yellow and you want to display those on the following video signals:
Ntsc, Pal, VGA, Component Video (YCbCr), HDMI, Composite, S-video
The thing can do that, even outputting them all at the same time!
640x480 on the HDMI without tricks and refresh rate games. (24p)
Full HDTV and above on the analog component and VGA, and the usual interlaced or non for Composite. 240i 480p.
Has a CORDIC math engine able to crank out trig, powers, roots, shared among all cores. Drop arguments, pick up some 50 ish cycles later. Amazingly, it is pipelined such that all cores can do that non stop and it all gets done.
Interrupts have been changed into events, with a time being one event, pin state changes, all sorts of fun things. Three level deep priority system too.
Let see, what else...
Oh, hardware locks for managing concurrent or parallel access to common memory.
Oh, this is big:
Every pin has a "smart pin" state machine that can do stuff like trigger an interrupt when a given state criteria is met.
Each PIN can be an ADC or DAC, and the input precision is up to 12 bits with builtin filtering, or you can get the raw stream to do better of you want to.
Outputs are high quality too.
Want an on board 20Mhz scope coupled with 100Mhz complex signal generator?
