Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1-14.
The Nvidia Tegra 2 system on a chip. © 2011 Nvidia Corporation.
Used by permission.
announced. Also in January 2011, Nvidia announced ''Project Denver,'' an ARM-
based system-on-a-chip being developed for the server and other markets. The de-
sign will incorporate multiple 64-bit ARM processors plus a general-purpose GPU
(GPGPU). The low-power aspects of the design will help to reduce the cooling re-
quirements of server farms and data centers.
Our third example is very different from our first (the x86 architecture, used in
personal computers and servers) and second (the ARM architecture, used in PDAs
and smartphones). It is the AVR architecture, which is used in very low-end em-
bedded systems. The AVR story starts in 1996 at the Norwegian Institute of Tech-
nology, where students Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan designed an 8-bit RISC
CPU called the AVR. It was reportedly given this name because it was ''(A)lf and
(V)egard's (R)ISC processor.'' Shortly after the design was completed, Atmel
bought the design and started Atmel Norway, where the two architects continued to
refine the AVR processor design. Atmel released their first AVR microcontroller,
the AT90S1200, in 1997. To ease its adoption by system designers, they imple-
mented the pinout to be exactly the same as that of the Intel 8051, which was one
