Now, I know a fair few people around here do/have done degrees like CS or EEE (or in my case, CSE), so I'm willing to bet some of you will be interested in this.
A company in Bristol called XMOS - born out of the University - has developed a new processor aimed at embedded environments. Some might say it sits somewhere between an ARM and a PIC, while others would say it kicks the arse of both of them.
They've got a small development starter kit now for sale with various discount offers. The kit's USB programmed/powered. It doesn't have much on it, but it does expose lots of I/O so you can hang what you want off it.
The processor is a four-core device, each core can run 4 threads, and it's so good at I/O that if you want to interface with something, you only need extra hardware to deal with the physical layer, then you define the rest in software.
The programming language used is called XC, which unsurprisingly mimics C in syntax, so anyone with a head for parallelism and a knowledge of embedded system programming will pick it up in a jiffy. There's a community driven site called Xlinkers with a discussion forum, examples and so on.
Why am I telling you this? Well for one I know some of you might want to have a play with this sort of thing, and secondly, I have course-mates who work there, along with my old course director, and one of the professors lecturing me this year is the CTO and co-founder![]()


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