Re: Do you see any future to the 8-bit MCU's?

On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:15:19 -0700, linnix wrote:

On Jul 21, 11:14 am, Tim Wescott <t...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:06:23 -0700, linnix wrote:
On Jul 21, 9:46 am, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 21.7.11 6:30 , Antoni Lacasta i Sullà wrote:

Hi,

During the latest months I have been receiving offers for 32-bit
MCU's, mostly based on ARM-Cortex CPU's, at prices I'm currently
paying for 8-bit devices, or even cheaper! This has brought me to
benchmark them with the MCU independent part of my C++ code and
surprisingly the results are quite similar.

Same price, same flash consumption ... what do yo think? Is this
the end of the 8-bit's? I guess it is.

Regards,
Toni.

I just redesigned an old card using a 8051, an A/D converter, a
static RAM (2 kilobytes) and some glue logic. The new card was done
with a Stellaris Cortex, LM3S818. All the IC:s on the new card
costed together less than the A/D converter chip on the old design.

When our current AVR -based designs need to be replaced, the
Stellaris chips are the potential replacements.

The Stellaris chips run fast with minimal electricity, but there is
the price of a quite complicated set-up of the master and peripheral
clocks and port pins.

Except for the price of the tools.  AVR and PIC tools are still much
cheaper.  We expect to spend around $1k for the new tools;
unfortunately, the cheap/low cost version won't cut it.

I'm using the gnu-arm tool chain, built from source*.  It works fine.

Does it work for Freescale's Cortex M4 w/ DSP?

I don't know -- but it took to the Cortex M3 like wildfire. I suspect
that the best you could hope for would be that the 'ordinary' C and C++
stuff would compile just fine, but anything DSP would have to be done in
assembly, by hand.

But then, that's the best I've ever gotten out of a 'paid for' tool chain.

How much does CodeSourcery want for the 'real' tools?

Around 1K for most of them.

Then unless you're facing a period of forced unemployment, just plain
want to learn how to build the tools, or head up a big group and can set
one person to being "the tools guy" it's probably worth it to buy, or to
try out their free tool chain.

* I'm not saying it was _free_, but I built the tool chain when I was
between contracts, so it was relatively cheap.

--
www.wescottdesign.com
.