Re: 8 bit microcontroller market


"Jim Granville" wrote...
Chris Hills wrote:

I would say that the market will split into 8 bit and 32 bit. Apart
from a few specialised parts like the MSP430 the 16 bit market will die
out.

Book mark this post and get me to eat my hat in about 5 years time :-)

Do we have to wait ~5 years ?

Spin and marketing will conspire against such predictions.

A good, very current example, is the ZNEO from Zilog.

Zilog pitch this as a 16 bit uC, as the base opcode is 16 bits, with
some larger opcodes. But it has 16 x 32 bit registers, and can do 64 bit
operand maths. Compare that with the CortexM3 (another new core), it has
16 x 32 bit registers, and the base opcode is 16 bits, with some 32 bit
ones.
It can multiply to 64 bit result, but seems to lack a 64/32:32
- this is pitched as 32 bit controller.

Who is 'right' ?

This shows the flaw in trying to firstly pigenhole uC into boxes, and
then moving pick winner(s) and looser(s).

Freescale look set to somewhat abandon these 8/16/32 bit pigenholes,
so maybe in 5 years time, we'll look back on attempts to quantify
complex devices with a single number, as quaint ? :)

-jg

Jim, the first thing I like to look at is the size of the ALU. Then, I try to look at
the size of the internal register datapath. Easiest way for me to do this is look at
instruction execution times. If it takes only one cycle to do a 16-bit ADD and they call
it a 16-bit, I call it a 16-bit.

But if 16-bit moves take twice as long as 8-bit and 16-bit arithmetic takes about twice
as long as 8-bit, it's an 8-bit to me. Just hardcoding an instruction to do "big math"
isn't enough for me.

This is a quick view - pipelines and other considerations can make things more
complicated.

Dataquest used to go by the size of the external databus (bad way to do it).

Bill Giovino
Executive Editor
http://Microcontroller.com




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