11–20 of 32 posts
Anyone know why the Dialog from back in September deal fell through?
Noooo. Damn. Really loved Ateml's IDE. Microchip always charged for their IDE/compiler and I never felt like it was quite as nice to use.
RIP Atmel Studios... I can only imagine how this is going to affect choosing a microcontroller in the future. When I was in school, PIC vs AVR was often debated. I also really liked the selection of ARM Cortex-M parts that Atmel offered. I can only hope that the good parts of Atmel remain into the future.
While Atmel MCUs are nice and robust (especially avr-gcc and avr-libc are great advantages) they seen like quite high cost. Cheaper ARMs probably are eating their lunch. Meanwhile, I've never been friends with the microchip Dev tools. Clunky, expensive, proprietary. Here's hoping we'll get AVR ergonomics and PIC economics... But it might be too late to matter. Cortex-M0 eats the low end, M4 the mid end, and the phone…
Well there still is a case for the AVR -- you get zero pipelining effects, no flash latency etc; it's like a tiny, slow, scalar CPLD for all intent and purpose. Cortex can't beat that, you can tight loop an AVR to cycle precision and get pretty cool return for your running frequency; the Cortex are nowhere as linear. [0] Altho, I agree that the bigger parts are useless... xmegas and such have absolutely no reason to…
And finally, the idea of tight loops engineered to cycle precision is dying a slow death in general. You just smother the hard timing requirements with excess frequency and performance.
Curious thing about the ESP8266: it doesn't use ARM or any of the other popular kids on the block but a Tensilica Xtensa architecture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed. Lighting an LED takes 100x the power of running a 10F series at full speed. I can buy some 10F series PICs cheaper than a 555 timer chip, which is pretty amazing.
> The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed I don't really believe either of those claims. At 1ku quantity on Digikey (which admittedly is not the cheapest vendor) cheapest Cortex-M0 chips cost $0.378 and low-power chips (NXP KL03) start from $0.504. That aforementioned KL03 is advertised to run at 50 µA/MHz. Meanwhile…
For a PIC10KF320/322 you're looking at:
Sleep: 20nA, 1.8V Operating: 25uA @ 1Mhz, 1.8V Watchdog Timer: 500nA, 1.8V
Of course that's dependent on what' you're doing with the io pins etc.
See:http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/40001585D.pd...
edit: fix typo
Noooo. Damn. Really loved Ateml's IDE. Microchip always charged for their IDE/compiler and I never felt like it was quite as nice to use.
Noooo. Damn. Really loved Ateml's IDE. Microchip always charged for their IDE/compiler and I never felt like it was quite as nice to use.
??? Microchip's IDE has always been free; the XC compilers all have free versions, the only restriction being that you can't use the higher level optimizations (-O2 and -O3 for XC16 are premium; not sure about XC8 and XC32)
Honestly, it's a difference in approach to tooling, Atmel took the approach of better, freely distributed tools. Now that they won't be around I don't know that Microchip will have a competitor in that space to keep them honest.
Atmel is so visible though, no wonder they're getting gobbled up. From a hobbyist point of view, I see so many projects involving Atmel chips is almost makes me think they have a monopoly on that, growing, segment of the market. This probably has as much to do with cheaper cost as it does with (relative) ease of use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed I don't really believe either of those claims. At 1ku quantity on Digikey (which admittedly is not the cheapest vendor) cheapest Cortex-M0 chips cost $0.378 and low-power chips (NXP KL03) start from $0.504. That aforementioned KL03 is advertised to run at 50 µA/MHz. Meanwhile…
Several of the PIC models have a low power mode where they run off an internal RC circuit somewhere in the KHz range. Just enough to wake up on an interrupt or some external stimuli and really pushes their power usage way down. For a PIC10KF320/322 you're looking at: Sleep: 20nA, 1.8V Operating: 25uA @ 1Mhz, 1.8V Watchdog Timer: 500nA, 1.8V Of course that's dependent on what' you're doing with the io pins etc. See: h…
Atmel is so visible though, no wonder they're getting gobbled up. From a hobbyist point of view, I see so many projects involving Atmel chips is almost makes me think they have a monopoly on that, growing, segment of the market. This probably has as much to do with cheaper cost as it does with (relative) ease of use.
Isn't it more that Arduino boards dominate the hobbyist microcontroller space, and they have historically used AVR? IIRC, most new Arduino models are now ARM based.
uno currently retails for $25, the arm-based zero is going for $50