What is "zpu"

The ZPU (Russian: зенитная пулемётная установка, meaning "anti-aircraft machine gun mount") is a family of towed anti-aircraft gun based on the Soviet 14.5×114mm KPV heavy machine gun. It entered service with the Soviet Union in 1949 and is used by over 50 countries worldwide.

Quadruple (ZPU-4), two double- (ZPU-2 and ZU-2) and single-barreled (ZPU-1) versions of the weapon exist.

The ZPU microprocessor is a stack machine designed to run supervisory code in electronic systems that include a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

The ZPU is notable because it is a relatively recent stack machine with a small but real economic niche, and it has a growing number of users and implementations. Many experts think that this is impossible.

The ZPU has been designed to require very small amounts of electronic logic, making more electronic logic available for other purposes in the FPGA. To make it easily usable, it has a port of the GNU Compiler Collection. This makes it much easier to apply than CPUs without compilers.

The ZPU is very small, but it is not fast. It keeps the intermediate results of calculations in memory, in a push-down stack, rather than in registers.

Zylin Corp. made the ZPU open-source in 2008.