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CPUs, MCUs, Processors and other Terms of Interest#

Modern computing terms like Processor, CPU, and MCU are poorly defined so I thought it would be smart to write down my own definitions of them right at front of this book.

  • SoC - System on a Chip - An integrated circuit that contains all components of a system on a single chip (substrate).
  • CPU - Central Processing Unit - The central processing core, obviously (e.g. Cortex-M0).
  • MCU - Microcontroller Unit - A SoC containing a CPU, memory, peripherals.
  • Processor - This is the most generic term (e.g. A microcontroller contains a processor, a CPU is a processor, a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 is a processor, a SoC may contain a procesor, ...)

Special Sections#

While reading this book you'll run into "Special Sections" which are there to increase the readability.

The following examples demonstrate the purpose of these sections:

Info

An additional information.

Tip

A helpful tip.

Attention

This part needs attention.

Example

A short example.

Quote

"A famous quote." - A. Guy

Code Highlighting#

Shell / Command Line#

Commands which are intended to be input in the shell or command line are prefixed by a "$" sign.

For example if i want you to get the version of the current gcc the following should be entered in the command line / bash:

$ gcc --version

C-Code#

You'll find a lot of C-Code on your way which will look like this:

int main(void)
{
  return 0;
}

Assembly#

And hopefully only a small amount of assembly, which will look like this:

.section  .text
.global   _start

_start:
    bkpt