Multi-threading?

I am thinking to use pic 16f84a to make a dmx512 reciever. It is suppose to recieve signals from a differential bus transceiver and generate necessary output base on that signal. I am doubt if the pic can read and generate output at the same time? Is it able to do multi-tasking where it can read and write at the same particular nano/micro seconds? If not, any better solutions? Thanks....

depending on how fast you run the processor. If you run at 20MHz, it will do things within a microsecond. The same nanosecond is not possible. The granularity of the PIC is one instruction which will always take longer than a nanosecond.

Multi tasking

Multi tasking is not the correct word..

you just need speed then for the eye it looks like multitasking.

but a cpu can only 1 thing @ a time...

TKS

all the microprocessors and microcontrollers work by executing one thread at a time. the trick is to speed the process of execution of a single thread to such an extent so that it looks as if the microP or the uC is doing alot of threads at the same time.

so multi-tasking could be simulated on a micro by executing two things at very fast speeds. multi threaded processing is totally not the thing for a simple microcontroller. its quite a hot issue these days in the computing industry because Intel seems to be planning to start developing multi core processors which will handle more threads at a single time. but as i said that this is not the domain for microcontrollers