Finally a PIC32 with FPU for embedded Lua on MIPS

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

Hi all,

A bit of good news for embedded Lua users, specifically on the 
topic of Lua on a MIPS chip :-)

A PIC32MZ EF Family data sheet recently popped up on Microchip's 
data sheet RSS feed [1]. FPU on the chip finally! No official 
announcement yet, and it's not in the PIC32 parts table, so 
probably no customer samples etc yet. It's just a data sheet drop 
before PR releases, advance info, but I think we should be able to 
buy it this year.

So finally there will be a MIPS part that can run standard Lua 
with floating point hardware, and minimal source code changes, and 
can be easily purchased by normal folks [2]. For those who don't 
want to peruse the data sheet, it's 200MHz, up to 512KB SRAM [3] 
and up to 2MB flash on chip. FPU throughput is mostly 1 cycle, 
latency for ADD/SUB is 4/5 cycles. Downside: the errata doc for 
its predecessor PIC32MZ EC family was very long...

[1] http://www.microchip.com/RSS/Recent-DataSheets.xml
[2] there is Ingenic, but it's kinda hard to source
[3] a goodly amount of RAM for Lua on an easily solderable TQFP 
(everything else with >=512KB SRAM on Farnell is a BGA part)

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia