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Breakeven point for DMA spi operations

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2026 5:39 pm
by geoffrey.brown
I'm wondering if anybody has a sense of when using a dma read or write operation is a win over transfers via polling assuming the spi clock is at or near the maximum for a given system clock speed.

Geoffrey

Re: Breakeven point for DMA spi operations

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2026 7:11 pm
by Giovanni
Hi,

Polled operations are great when you need very low latency or exchanging just one or few frames at time. DMA operations are optimal for large transfer but have the extra cost of setting up DMA at begin, more latency.

Polled operations drawback is polling itself, the thread executing that is not yielding to other threads during operation, best used in low priority threads so it does not affect others.

Giovanni