Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture DMAs? Reply To: DMAs?

CPUSpeedup
Participant
Post count: 11

I searched and found a couple results, some from 2015 and some saying not yet filed.

I’ve never been good with remembering or knowing what things are called. Maybe this isn’t considered as a DMA but I remember specifically game consoles would use a DMA to copy binary to their graphics unit and this is roughly the same idea. I was wondering two specific things.

The first is what if I’m connected to a wireless modem (wifi or maybe cell). Let’s say it’s buffered and all I need to do is read the 8/16/32/64 byte from a specific memory address, write it to my cache then repeat. Is there any hardware so I can do this in parallel? And how do I know when it’s finished?

The second is what if I’m using something like a UART that runs at a specific baud rate. I obviously don’t want to read a byte (or a few bits) and wait. Is there hardware that will copy bits to a cache for me and let me know when it’s ready?

I might as well ask but what about timers? I’m assuming there will at least be one so the hardware can do a thread switch?