I am a big fan of the Texas Instruments Beagle Bone PRU concept. It is such a joy to be able to just write a U32 to a register or similarly read from one and in 5ns send or receive so many channels of data, and then to be able to share memory space with a non-deterministic layer that can handle storage or communication. Which makes me wonder if there is a similar product that has access to more channels (for instance 32 simultaneously, or even better 64). Does anyone out there know of any, ideally at at least 100MHz. Thanks in advance.
Yes, the PRUSS are a big advantage for the BB hardware.
AFAIK the PRUSS concept is unique. The CPU supports 16 channel output and 17 channel input on each PRU. You cannot use both, input and output at the same line.
In order to use all channels you’ll also have to wire the SD card slot and JT connectors. Find details at
https://users.freebasic-portal.de/tjf/Projekte/libpruio/doc/html/ChaTNT.html#SecPruGpio
Note: there’s one cycle for fetching an input or rising an ouptut. So the maximum frequency for a closed loop controller is 50 MHz.