Ah! But this chip only has a sub-uA sleep mode. So it will have the said decades battery life if it sleeps most of the time, which might be true in the cases of some kind of IoT application, but not if it's actually running often.
New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
51–60 of 92 posts
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an additional data point, BTU isn't used in Britain very much these days. As with germany, kilowatt-hour is the preferred unit of (heating) energy.
Um, I should have elaborated in my original post - it most definitely is still heavily used in the UK by, for example, architects when evaluating how much heating a house will need. My original post wasn't terribly clear about that, my bad... Yes, consumer-facing information these days is indeed more likely to be expressed in kilowatt-hours...
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#53It all started with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbNnNF9JHFQ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tec... ARM low power consumption was an accident caused by financial constrains. Small team with no money (Acorn was starting to go downhill at the time) forced Sophie Wilson/Steve Furber team to be clever with resources. In 1987 hand routed ARM2 build with 30K transistors ran at 8MHz reachin…
I don't think that is a fair comparison. The 386 was a true CISC design while the ARM2 was RISC. One of the major points of RISC was to reduce silicon complexity by using a less complex design (and shoving the complexity onto software). Intel could have built an equal or better chip than the ARM2 but they were worrying about servicing the already established market for x86. P.S. Is it even reasonable to compare MIPS…
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#54meanwhile the latest and greatest 2015 device is an all-day wristwatch the weight of a pack of cards [1] (for the smaller Apple watch [2]) that in Apple's own "watch test" tells time for up to 48 days before dying --- whoops, no, I meant 48 hours [3] : >Testing conducted by Apple in March 2015 using preproduction Apple Watch and software paired with an iPhone using preproduction software with 5 time checks (4 seconds…
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... PIC is weird. But it does the job and as the other comment said, they had a lot of models with a lot of devices (ADC, DAC, USB, fully configurable ports, etc). Also cheap and available in "hobbyist" form factors (DIP) Yes, you would either go to Assembly (which is harder to use than "tradicional uCs" - like 8051 family, Z80, etc), C compilers (some limited), or there was even PIC basic, heh ARM? Write in C, "…
I quite liked PIC stuff for the hardware USB support, which I used with a PIC32 DIP chip. They also have a gcc port for their architectures now, which is quite nice xc8,16,32. Although apparently the 'free' version of it, doesn't provide all optimizations annoyingly. I'm starting to use ARM dev boards now, because of things like the MHz and the nice compilers available.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#56I see that it's 32-bit, is the year 2038 problem a significant concern for a device like this?
Not if you run an operating system/code with 64 bit time_t, like NetBSD or OpenBSD. I can't imagine you would run an OS on it though.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... PIC is weird. But it does the job and as the other comment said, they had a lot of models with a lot of devices (ADC, DAC, USB, fully configurable ports, etc). Also cheap and available in "hobbyist" form factors (DIP) Yes, you would either go to Assembly (which is harder to use than "tradicional uCs" - like 8051 family, Z80, etc), C compilers (some limited), or there was even PIC basic, heh ARM? Write in C, "…
I quite liked PIC stuff for the hardware USB support, which I used with a PIC32 DIP chip. They also have a gcc port for their architectures now, which is quite nice xc8,16,32. Although apparently the 'free' version of it, doesn't provide all optimizations annoyingly. I'm starting to use ARM dev boards now, because of things like the MHz and the nice compilers available.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that is a fair comparison. The 386 was a true CISC design while the ARM2 was RISC. One of the major points of RISC was to reduce silicon complexity by using a less complex design (and shoving the complexity onto software). Intel could have built an equal or better chip than the ARM2 but they were worrying about servicing the already established market for x86. P.S. Is it even reasonable to compare MIPS…
Interestingly, there is a thread on RWT that talked about this where Linus Torvalds was involved. It seems that it wasn't until 486DX2 in 1992 that x86 was beginning to beat RISC and even 68040 on the lower end. And remember that 33Mhz 386s did not even arrive until 1989 or so.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#59Ah! But this chip only has a sub-uA sleep mode. So it will have the said decades battery life if it sleeps most of the time, which might be true in the cases of some kind of IoT application, but not if it's actually running often.
Oh look, we just launched a MCU with a power consumption so low that you can keep it powered for twenty years. As long as you don't do anything with it. Of course, every other figure that would make this one useful (such as per-module current consumption, time to sleep) is missing.
It's especially funny when everyone claims they have "the best" or "state of the art" consumption, but when you factor in everything else it turns out they're pretty much within the noise figure of the current state of affairs.
In my whole engineering career, I'm yet to see a press release or a market launch that isn't full of bullshit. Just hand me the bloody datasheet and give me a break, folks.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm trying to figure out if you're joking or not. BTU = British Thermal Unit and is pretty much the standard measure used around the world when talking about energy use associated with heating. It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, regardless of where you find yourself in the world...
"It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit" Now, presume there is no gauge at hand to measure a pound less a thermometer to measure fahrenheits. Often outside of commonwealth territories and US we use SI :)
Firstly, I'm Australian. We use SI measurements - your comment is not just smug, but wrong.
Secondly, are you honestly postulating that people understand the underlying reality of what a kilowatt hour actually means? That they have a "gauge" that can measure kilowatts? Of course they don't, and for that matter most people that use BTUs don't really understand what they represent either. They just know that it's a measurement of energy-use. All they really want is something that allows them to compare two options, and frankly, the units matter not at all.