Ask Slashdot: When Should You Call Hardware a 'SoC'? - Slashdot

Posted by EditorDavid

• The Wikipedia page linked in the first line of the summary has a good definition. I'll include it here for the people who didn't read that far:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Re:

    The Wikipedia page linked in the first line of the summary has a good definition.

    I'll agree with their definition.

    I note that it's also somewhat dated and misses a bunch of stuff. Two items struck me:

    - It seems to completely miss the IoT system-on-a-chip families that underly all those bluetooth-low-energy devices. Processor(s), flash, RAM, host of peripherals, including several networking variants and at least one radio, bunch of GPIO, A/D, etc. for controlling and monitoring, under a buck in qua

    • Re:

      So what's the difference between a microcontroller, like the ESP32, and a SoC used in an IoT device, like an ESP32?

      • Re:

        You can have a system-on-chip microcontroller. These are distinguished from other microcontrollers by having lots of relatively sophisticated peripherals on the same die as the processor core. Think of all the stuff that usually lives on the "south bridge" in a traditional or high-end PC.

      • Re:

        So what's the difference between a microcontroller, like the ESP32, and a SoC used in an IoT device, like an ESP32?

        I have no clue about Tensilica's stuff, other than that (at least part of) the ESP32 series uses their proprietary LX6 processor cores.

        I was thinking of things like Nordic's nRF series, which use ARM cores and which I'd definitely consider SoCs. But several other families I've worked with also IMHO would qualify.

        Many IoT SoCs work fine as microcontrollers, so I suspect the difference in some c

• I'd even call the newer Intel/AMD CPUs SoCs because they have integrated GPUs inside the processor itself.

  If it's a pure CPU with nothing additional besides a cache, it would not be a SoC.

  • Re:

    No, because they don't have all the core functionality for a system, such as USB, on the chip. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they still require the southbridge chis to make a real system? They have generally integrated the northbridge chip into the CPU, so that's a big step.

    But in general, which I hear SoC, I think Raspberry Pi, cell phone, or equivalent embedded system.

    • Re:

      You're close. Modern AMD/Intel CPUs do have some PCIe lanes dedicated to storage subsystems. Then they offer a few more lanes for an external chipset.

    • Re: Degree of integration

      SoC would be CPU, north, south, RAM, and some form of NV storage for firmware. All it should need to be a fully functional computer, sans optional things like modem, display, additional NV storage, additional RAM, GPU, etc, all of which may or may not be on the same die as the CPU.

    • Re:

      Modern AMD and Intel CPUs include integrated USB.

      Here's a good block diagram of what services are where (the CPU is the block labeled Socket AM5): https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-co... [wccftech.com]

      • Re:

        Thanks. It's obviously been too long since I've looked.

  • Re: Degree of integration

    An SoC has integrated RAM, not just a GPU.

    • Re:

      Hardly any SoC's include system RAM.

      • Re: Degree of integration

        Then those aren't SoC's.

• Those have both become such "marketing terms", that they too have lost meaning. The threshold for what is considered "artificial intelligence" has sunk to a point that you could probably sell a four function calculator, as using "AI" to do basic arithmetic.

  • DevOps

    DevOps... DevOps teams and DevOps roles are oxymorons if you go by the original definition. If a company creates a DevOps team as a new silo so the Devs are more isolated from the Operational side of the product, they are 100% missing the point of DevOps.

    In case you are wondering DevOps is a culture or a mindset where the Dev teams collaborates with the Ops team. This lead to software that is more stable and scales better. You can, and should, add a team that helps bring the tooling and processes to make D

    • Re:

      I've seen teams being labeled DevOps when they are neither Devs nor Ops. It was baffling when I ran across this, but the director said it was because he wanted the team to feel like they were more in control or such. Buzzwords: gotta use them before they fall out of fashion.

  • Re:

    SoC - System on a Chip. These have traditionally been CPU+ram+flash, but _also_ with modules for I/O handling (dma, uart, usb, etc). One chip, solder it on a board with the appropriate resistors, capacitors, inductions, and some application components like sensors, and you've got a whole system.

    Now CPUs for PCs are odd things. They're no longer just CPUs, they're a sandwich of multiple boards each with many chips, sometimes miniaturized as multiple dies in the same plastic/epoxy package. More than the C

    • Re:

      These days, SoCs generally are everything but memory - so they have your processor core, memory interface(s), peripherals like timers, interrupts and others, plus external I/O which generally include I/O devices like GPIO, SD/MMC controllers, PCIe, USB, and other interfaces all in one package.

      Memory, both RAM and flash are typically external to the chip because they are often sized to needs.

      SoCs generally refer to higher performance devices like application processors that run Android and other things, but

      • Re:

        There's a big range though. The SoCs I've used had RAM and Flash. Thus an entire product was SoC plus RF chip plus discrete components. Others I see have internal RAM and Flash but allow external as well for a larger amount (sometimes 2MB is too small, go figure). Also the size varies hugely, from 16-bit chips up to the equivalent of last millenium's supercomputers.

        I've seem the SoM with a slightly different term, and worked on one, though we didn't have a term other than Module. There are also the sta

• • In my mind, a microcontroller is a microprocessor (usually 8-bit or 16-bit) that supports only very limited external peripherals via GPIO, serial, SPI, or maybe I2C. It's an SoC when it has a PCI bus, a GPU, USB, networking hardware, or other similarly complex ASIC cells.

    A microcontroller also usually has RAM, EPROM, and flash memory built into the chip, whereas a SoC usually doesn't, though that line is starting to blur.

    • Re:

      Feels opposite to me. Microcontroller is often used as a synonym for just the CPU, plus RAM or such maybe. Whereas SoC adds extra bit beyond that computing parts: UART, ethernet MAC, SPI, I2C, USB, USART, and other things to talk to peripherals.

      But mostly, microcontroller is the $1.99 part and the SoC is the $3.99 part:-)

      • Re:

        Most people consider the ATmega8, ATmega32a, and ATmega2560 to be microcontrollers, and they have SPI and UART/USART. (The latter two also have I2C.)

        But Ethernet or USB clearly cross the line into SoC territory.

        • Re:

          It's maybe a matter of degree. I sort of considered the PIC or AVR chips to be SoCs, but the term itself really seemed to only be with 32-bit chips like Arm or PowerPC. You can take that Atmega88, add some discrete components, and have full system for your application on a single chip.

          Thus, "SoC" is more a marketing term than being highly specified. Even Wikipedia fudges here with a micro-controller being "similar to but less sophisticated than" an SoC.

      • Re:

        Back in ye olde days there was distinction.

        A microcontroller "controls", it interfaces to things to sense and manipulate something in the real world.
        A microprocessor "processes", it does computation - math, logic, flow.

        A controller didn't always have or need a CPU.
        RAM was only needed to store state, and even then a few flipflops will store dedicated bits just fine without being general purpose or randomly accessible.

        The "micro" prefix came into common usage upon the invention of the integrated circuit.
        A pro

    • Re:

      I would have agreed with you 10 years ago. But these days the lines between MCU and SoC are incredibly blurry. My goto cheap disposable microcontroller is 32bit, includes 4 dynamic busses (serial, SPI, I2C selectable), integrated ethernet, integrated USB, dedicated bus to communicate with external storage and while it doesn't have a PCI bus, that's just a name of one type of bus. That's still an MCU to me, but is frighteningly close to a computer. Heck on an ESP32 some guy has managed to get Linux to boot.

  • Re:

    All microcontrollers are SOC, not all SOC are microcontrollers.

• A microprocessor which doesn't need a motherboard chipset to fanout connections to memory/peripherals is a SoC, to me. Language is as always fuzzy though, even within technical fields rigor is more exception than rule.

  • Re:

    May I take exception to "always"? Language is usually fuzzy, which is usually a useful feature. But in a few - mostly technical - fields, absolute accuracy, rigour, and consistency are vital.

    One of the biggest problems we have is that people are often unsure about the boundary between fuzzy language and rigorous language.

• Image manipulation that talks about "turning left or right" when they mean "rotate anti-clockwise or clockwise". I see this in real life where people talk about turning door handles left/right. When I complain people either look blankly or explain that "clockwise" is not understood any more, all clocks are digital - in spite of clock emojis [emojipedia.org] all being of round/analogue clocks.

  • Re:

    Maybe we should use the terms deosil and widdershins instead

    • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    Right-hand screw rule vs left-hand screw rule FTW. Damn kids shortcutting things...

• I've heard people refer to the desktop/tower portion of a PC as a "hard drive" more than a few times. Working in the HVAC industry, laymen tend to refer to every refrigerant as "Freon", even though it is actually a brand name, not a specific refrigerant.

  Lately, with the vinyl record resurgence, there's folks calling records "vinyls", and butchering the names of the various parts of a turntable in all sorts of hideous ways. That really grinds some peoples' gears.

  Pretty much just have to figure that to some

  • Re:

    That sort of thing is pretty common. For example, people say "Xerox" instead of "photocopy". Companies usually discourage this to help protect their trademarks from becoming common use terms and un-protectable.

  • Re:

    I've heard people refer to the desktop/tower portion of a PC as a "hard drive" more than a few times.

    That would be a big F-ing hard drive, apparently.
    
    Well, as long as they get the "cup holder" disambiguated from the "optical disk drive", they'll probably be okay.

• There is a current trend that cyber is used as a noun to refer to cyber security. To the point that anything containing the word cyber is assumed to be about security. Drives me crazy.

  • Re:

    Particularly because when I grew up, "wanna cyber?" referred specifically to erotic chat, or "cybersex" as it was once known.

• is the kind of coworker that microwaves fish in the office

  • Re:

    According to the The Good Place [wikipedia.org], it's one of the many things that could get you sent to The Bad Place...

    Full scene: Quick Litmus Test [youtube.com] (worth watching all 3m:16s)

    @2:12 Did you ever reheat fish in office microwave? [youtube.com]
    @2:22 Did you ever take off your shoes and socks on a commercial airline? [youtube.com]

• I can't believe this "questionc made the frontpage.:/

  • Re:

    Didn't you know? The whole point of becoming knowledgeable in a field is so that you can perform gatekeeping when other people botch the nomenclature. It's basically the whole reason an English major exists.

  • it's not slashdot unless

    The announcer butchers it by saying forward slash forward slashTHAT slashdot motherf***r

• You can call it that, when its a System on a Chip.

  Come back for more insightful advise. I did not even have to run chatGPT for this one.

  • It's about defining system on a chip

    Let me rephrase:
    What is and isn't a system on a chip?

• If I had a coworker who got annoyed that I didn't use perfect terminology around them I'd stop talking to them. If I had to interact with this person all the time I'd find a new job.
  
  The answer is "don't worry about it". Ketchup, Catsup, who cares.

• My boss once wrote some notes on what my job entails. He ended with "logistical backstopping".

  I asked him what he meant. He said, "You know.."

  I've worked here 16 years, I still don't know wtf that means. ha

• In my lifetime I've gathered a large catalog of misused (IMHO) technical terms that could bother me, but I've let it go. You see, languages mutate over time, going through a never ending evolution that is affected by a myriad of factors, correctness not being high on the list. Pro tip: No one likes a scold.

• If they're really refering to the whole unit (including the panel) as an "SoC", that does seem weird. But there's a lot we don't know..

  - Are they *really* referring to the whole unit as an "SoC", or some part of it?
  - Are these technical people (I'm guessing not)?
  - Does it actually matter that much to you?

  My first response is "just let it slide - it doesn't matter". But then I remember how much it bothered me how, for several years, our faculty were referring to any new iteration they'd made on some existing

  • Re: Well, I get the triggering in this specific ca

    Good point. It could just be an example of synecdoche, like how you might refer to a car as a set of wheels.

• And I think one of teaching's big requirements is clarity of thought. Another is clarity when explaining to someone else.

  If the word is used too broadly (like something being 'woke') then lots of people can think they know what it means, but cannot succinctly define it. Non-technical people get annoyed by technical language because it feels obtuse. Confusing. Overly precise. Technical people get annoyed when non-technical people misuse technical language because the details are clear to them, and matte

  • Re:

    It means to be aware of systematic injustices present in society. The people who misuse it to mean "I don't like this TV show because it has too many gay or brown people in it" just don't want to admit to that being their definition.

    It's misused mostly by people who don't realize how good they actually had it. You know, things like not having to stay closeted throughout all of highschool for fear of getting beat to death.

• I'm generally okay with misappropriating terms from a completely different field, but cooling water systems are a thing which have existed long, and the definition of open loop and closed loop cooling are defined based on the containment of the heat movement fluid, not on whether you get to build it yourself with off the shelf parts. 100% of "open loop" watercooling systems in PC are actually closed loop cooling systems./petpeeve that hasn't been mentioned here yet.

• This used to mean a thing.
  And now (for the last 20y actually) it is used for something totally different.

  And whenever you mention the true meaning, you feel pedantic.

• I'm reminded of the modern AMD desktop and mobile processors, particularly Rembrandt, which has brought a lot of hardware onto the processor package—a thunderbolt controller, NVMe, a very very good GPU, I think audio, and possibly even an ethernet controller. The approach seems to have worked out quite well for them. It's interesting to see AMD and Intel adopting different traits from the ARM world—AMD has started dragging as much functionality as possible onto the processor package to allow the

• Why do we need to be so pedantic about squishy terms like 'SoC' and 'microservice'?