Description
Teensy 4.1 Development Board
Teensy 4.1 features an ARM Cortex-M7 processor at 600 MHz. Actual size is 2.4 by 0.7 inch, same form-factor as Teensy 3.6.
Teensy 4.1 uses the same processor as Teensy 4.0, but provides greater I/O capability, including an ethernet PHY, SD card socket, and USB host port. Teensy 4.1 also comes with 4X larger flash memory, and has 2 locations to optionally add more memory.
SPECIFICATION NOTES
ARM Cortex-M7 brings many powerful CPU features to a true real-time microcontroller platform.
Cortex-M7 is a dual-issue superscaler processor, meaning M7 can execute 2 instructions per clock cycle, at 600 MHz! Of course, executing 2 simultaneously depends upon the compiler ordering instructions and registers. Initial benchmarks have shown C++ code compiled by Arduino tends to achieve 2 instructions about 40% to 50% of the time while performing numerically intensive work using integers and pointers.
Cortex-M7 is the first ARM microcontroller to use branch prediction. On M4, loops and other code which much branch take 3 clock cycles. With M7, after a loop has executed a few times, the branch prediction removes that overhead, allowing the branch instruction to run in only a single clock cycle.
Tightly Coupled Memory is a special feature which allows Cortex-M7 fast single cycle access to memory using a pair of 64 bit wide buses. The ITCM bus provides a 64 bit path to fetch instructions. The DTCM bus is actually a pair of 32 bit paths, allowing M7 to perform up to 2 separate memory accesses in the same cycle. These extremely high speed buses are separate from M7’s main AXI bus, which accesses other memory and peripherals. 512K of memory can be accessed as tightly coupled memory. Teensyduino automatically allocates your Arduino sketch code into ITCM and all non-malloc memory use to the fast DTCM, unless you add extra keywords to override the optimized default.
Memory not accessed on the tightly coupled buses is optimized for DMA access by peripherals. Because the bulk of M7’s memory access is done on the 2 tightly coupled buses, powerful DMA-based peripherals have excellent access to the non-TCM memory for highly efficient I/O.
Teensy 4.1’s Cortex-M7 processor includes a floating point unit (FPU) which supports both 64 bit “double” and 32 bit “float”. With M4’s FPU on Teensy 3.5 & 3.6, and also Atmel SAMD51 chips, only 32 bit float is hardware accelerated. Any use of double, double functions like log(), sin(), cos() means slow software implemented math. Teensy 4.1 executes all of these with FPU hardware.
Warranty is valid for thirty days, starting upon date of receipt.
