SparkFun Forums

[magicvikraman]

What is the fastest microcontroller? can the speed be 1Ghz?

[skimask]

blue?

[leon_heller]

What do you mean by "fastest"?

[skimask]

The one with the highest terminal velocity???

[Valen]

Here's one.

http://www.elektor.com/news/8-bit-pic16 ... 8685.lynkx

But if it is ready for production.... who knows. Sounds more like an experiment.

The real question is, why do you need Gigaherz speeds?

[MichaelN]

Depends what you mean by "microcontroller". The Raspberry Pi uses a Broadcom BCM2835 "system on a chip" (ie, lots of integrated peripherals as well as the CPU), and can be run at 1GHz. Probably a good choice for a new design, given the amount of code out their being written for the Pi.

[magicvikraman]

Thanks guys!
I wanted to read data from a video source which gives data throgugh a High speed USB . I also wanted to run some processing on the image. I worked with pi and it works fine. But pi comes out with lot of other peripherals like hdmi cable and other stuff. Also I would need to use a external memory card. So if there is a way I can get a customized one out of pi which can use this BCM2835 and have a usb HS connector and a pin out to say led light to indicate alone that would be great.

[stevech]

Rasperry Pi is arguably not a microprocessor. Nor the ARMs in smart phones. More like a general purpose computer.
On the Pi, If you use VNC you don't need to use the HDMI port, nor the keyboard/mouse connections.
On mine, I mount a shared folder on my file server and RPI uses that for my work, rather than the SD car.

Fast micro... where micro is, let's say, 512KB or less program storage (flash these days). And like 64KB or less RAM.
That'd take us to the small ARM7, ARM Cortext M0, M3. These all use a relatively low freq. crystal and internally a phase locked loop provides the CPU and I/O bus clocks at a large multiple of the crystal freq. 72-100MHz is typical. (No, GHz is not what you find in low end micros; the chips are $2-10 or so.)

There are faster DSP chips, but arguably they're not general purpose.

In 8 bit micros, some of the AVRs get to 20MHz and are really inexpensive. But most micros relegate really high speed things to special hardware. And most (all) 8 bitters don't have floating point hardware- as it's not needed, and/or fixed point math is used to save money.

[MichaelN]

But pi comes out with lot of other peripherals like hdmi cable and other stuff. Also I would need to use a external memory card. So if there is a way I can get a customized one out of pi which can use this BCM2835 and have a usb HS connector and a pin out to say led light to indicate alone that would be great.

Why can't you just use the Pi? At $35, you'd be hard pressed to do it cheaper. The only reason I can think of would be if the Pi is physically too large for your application. If you decide to design your own board, you'll either need the skills and equipment to work with BGAs, or will need to contract it to someone who does.