naming CPUs

"master and slave" were never particularly descriptive terms, anyway. "Master" seems pretty obvious and probably translates to most languages but what does a "slave" do? Always do the work the master says? As conservatives are fond of saying there were lots of types of slavery throughout history it wasn't all whips and cotton-picking.

I think engineering should really use engineering terms, not anthropomorphic analogies when it can. I don't like a lot of the alternatives better though sometimes primary/secondary or leader/follower doesn't make sense, either.

But while being somewhat vague I think "Master" in isolation is ok, if one is doing the complex operations and one is optimized for realtime speed why not "Master/Blaster"? Sounds cool, unlikely to offend anyone except people who don't like Mad Max movies.

Howsabout "Core" and "Leaf"?

MasterBlaster ain't bad.

I accidentally found some people who overclock the RP2040 chip, past its 133 MHz spec. Seems like 420 MHz just works. Some maniac froze one and got it to run at 1 GHz.

Primary/secondary or payload/auxiliary or metrology/comms or any of countless others

I think the fundamental characteristic of "slavery" is that one person is the property of another, not one who does what's requested which is more like leader/follower.

What does it mean for one processor to be "property" of another? Doesn't make sense.

TX and RX are ambiguous. One box's TX is the other guy's RX.

When I did supervisory controls and building automation, I used "poll" for commands sent from the central computer, and "reply" back from remote gadgets.

Leader-Follower. There are more - IEEE worries about such things.

Joe Gwinn

There’s always the cube farm approach: boss and peon. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not Lord and Peon?

Joe Gwinn

Synapse and Dendrite?

Leader and Follower ... Fuhrer and Sheeple?

brain and brawn?

Though I'd probably go with something more boring, like cpu-a and cpu-b or just cpu-1 and cpu-2.

(Yes, names are very important. I seem to spend more time thinking about names than most other implementatioon details, plus refactoring [code] when it becomes clear the original name for something was misleading.)

Stevie Wonder in 1980 ? (Master Blaster - Jammin')

Cheers, Gerhard

Manager and worker.

Nah, that’s the peasant farm approach. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Too much of a commitment, all those syllables. You might as well propose “Permanent Secretary” and “non-departmental public body”. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Trump and Vance?

Calvin & Hobbes.

cu Michael

but it's been used so long everyone knows what it means ...