The difference between MCU and ARM

I believe that many netizens are very confused about the difference between MCU and ARM. The following editor will explain the difference between the two one by one:

1. Software

This is probably the biggest difference . The operating system was introduced. Why was the operating system introduced? What are the benefits?

1) Convenience. This is mainly reflected in the later development, that is, developing applications directly on the operating system. Unlike a single-chip microcomputer, everything needs to be rewritten. The early operating system transplantation work still needs to be done by professionals.

2) Security. This is a feature of LINUX. The memory management of the LINUX kernel and user space is separated, so the system will not crash due to a single program error of the user. This has never been seen in the software development of single-chip microcomputers.

3) Efficiency. The introduction of process management and scheduling system makes the system run more efficiently. In traditional single-chip microcomputer development, most of them are based on interrupt-based foreground and background technologies, which have limitations in the management of multiple tasks.

2. Hardware

The current 8-bit microcontroller technology hardware is developing very fast, and many very powerful microcontrollers have appeared. However, there is still some gap compared with 32ARM.

ARM chips usually integrate SDRAM, LCD and other controllers into the chip. In 8-bit machines, most of them need to be expanded externally.

In general, a MCU is a microcontroller, and ARM is obviously a microprocessor.

After the introduction of embedded operating system, many functions that single-chip system cannot complete can be realized. For example: embedded web server, Java virtual machine, etc. In other words, there are many free resources to use, and the above two services are examples. If you develop these functions on a single-chip computer, you can imagine the difficulty.

Finally, let me use a metaphor to describe the difference between them:

Unilever introduced a soap packaging production line, but found that the production line had a defect: there were often boxes without soap. They couldn't sell empty boxes to customers, so they had to hire a postdoctoral student in automation to design a solution to sort the empty soap boxes. The postdoctoral student assembled a research team of more than a dozen people, and used a combination of mechanical, microelectronic, automation, X-ray detection and other technologies, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to successfully solve the problem. Whenever an empty soap box passes through the production line, the detectors on both sides will detect it and drive a robot to push the empty soap box away.

A township enterprise in southern China also bought the same production line. When the boss found this problem, he was furious and asked a worker to fix it for him. The worker came up with a solution: he placed a fan next to the production line and blew it hard, so the empty soap boxes would be blown away.