Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Cool! Refreshing with new hardware capabilities, and it seems they thought it through with the addition of a universal (yeah ...) hex format to support both v1 and v2 platforms from a single file.

The new nRF52833 MCU [1] seems pretty capable and certainly inline with what is being used in industry for suitable applications (it's an Cortex-M4 64 MHz, 128 KB RAM, 512 KB flash, Bluetooth) but it doesn't seem to have hardware support for any ML-specific stuff that I could see.

Oh, and there has been a keming accident on one of the images that is a bit unfortunate, the word "MakeCode" looks a great deal like "MaleCode" which is perhaps not optimal in their context [2].

[1] https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wi...

[2] https://tech.microbit.org/docs/latest-revision/assets/blog/s...

Glad you like the Universal Hex format! And thanks for the headsup on the SVG - we noticed it earlier and there's a fix on the way through the site build(though whether you get 'Male code' or just bad kerning seems weirdly system dependent). Fix via https://github.com/microbit-foundation/dev-docs/pull/168 :D

Is there a file size difference with the Universal Hex that impacts how much code can be delivered?

Thankfully not - the file gets larger but as there's an MCU managing the writing to flash, it selects the right binary for the appropriate device.

There are some limitations around ensuring backwards compatibility: if you want to write a program that runs on both devices, you have to adhere to the constraints of the smaller one - but I think it's a fair tradeoff!

It has a 32-bit FPU, with single cycle add and single cycle multiply; it also supports 16 bit float storage format. It lets you run small models, but note that you can't fit big ones in flash anyways.

There are also some DSP instructions, but it's only 2x16 bit mulitply and 4x8 bit saturating addition, so not so much use.

OT: lovely with "keming"! It's a subreddit devoted to kerning-"accidents" (ie spacing between letters) with a very fitting name.

https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/

Love it! Corney, CIinton, Obarna!

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