Re: LPC or SAM7?

On Jul 31, 9:08 am, "Anthony Fremont" <any...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Does it even matter? I've been doing the smaller micros (PIC, 8052, etc) in
assembler for quite a while now, and I'd like to tinker with some ARM type
stuff using C (gcc will be fine). I want to be able to use TCP/IP on the
board. Looks like Olimex makes some pretty decent looking dev boards for
cheap, but I don't know if I should lean towards the LPC line or the SAM7.
What say ye?

thanks for reading

There is a comparison of many ARM7 devices at www.gnuarm.com. Go to
the Resources page and click on the Device Comparison link. You will
find a table with many devices although the table is not up to date
and there are several new devices that are not included.

I agree with the others that the differences are small compared to the
similarities. Both Atmel and Philips have a wide range of peripherals
available in many flavors of their devices.

Other than the details of the peripherals, the main difference between
the SAM7 and the LPC2 lines are the speed of the CPU and the DMA. The
LPC parts run a bit faster with the SAM7 requiring a wait state at
speeds above 30 MHz, IIRC and top out at 55 MHz. Some LPC devices
rurn at up to 70 MHz for inline code with no wait states, although
branches require a flush of the memory buffer. The SAM7 parts can use
DMA for peripheral access while the LPC must use program controlled I/
O.

Both families are very low power and all of the others are around
double these power levels at full speed. In fact, these 32 bit
devices are thriftier than many 8 bit devices when normalized for
speed! At very low speeds the other devices use *much* more power
than either of these two. Someone has said that they found the SAM7
parts to run at lower power than the LPC, but I don't see that
reflected in the data sheets. I have not worked with the LPC parts
myself so I can't say.

On the other hand, I don't think any of the ARM families will operate
at less than 3.3 volts for I/O, although the cores can run directly
from a lower supply saving even more power.

So to say which ARM family is better, you need to define your
requirements and see which has strengths that match your
requirements.


.

Quantcast