It's all about marketing and money, not engineering and gates. It can increase their profits even if each one costs them *more* to make.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
Quite true but wasn't the original poster looking for something simple for learning purposes?
I have yet to see a better designed and crafted use of 16 bits for an instruction. The JSR you mention is itself a thing of beauty and power -- it's utility exceeds mere subroutine calls and is useful for coroutines and more.
For embedded processors, I can accept the idea that better might possibly be done. For example, I'm attracted to the idea of using one of the registers as a constant generator, combined with the addressing modes to provide commonly found constants. The loss of a register might be well compensated -- and I think an analysis of a large number of real embedded applications should be done and would help to decide if so. The MSP-430, for example, takes this approach -- but sacrifices too much in going over the top to support 16 registers in each and every instruction and thereby severely cripples its addressing modes.
Jon
That must have been a long time ago ? - In feb 2006 the quote their much bigger USB devices as >= $1.76/10K, for the 32x and >= $3.42/10K for the 34x.
Having said that, when you work out the PIC Average selling price, it is still very close to $1 - so they clearly deliver shiploads of vanilla devices...
-jg
Long enough that I don't remember exactly when. Maybe 3 or 4 years ago. As I said, it was Cygnal then. And the incident sticks out because it was extreme. I don't doubt their prices have come down.
It just seemed funny that Microchip almost always had exactly the part we needed, with nothing missing, and very little (if any) extra.
Regards, -=Dave
-- Change is inevitable, progress is not.
If you are a student of processor design, this one is worth a look.
Bizare rollout aside, this started life as a FPGA core, and uses 32 bit opcodes, so has room for two 9 bit register fields.
Similar to the Intel 196, that blurred register/ram
Present silicon has a 512W memory limit (per core, of which there are 8!), but it looks like the CALL can go further, in future.
-jg
I think PIC addresses a different market. They are designed as logic replacement, not as general purpose CPUs, hence the unsuitability for e.g. the C language. For logic replacement, an ARM would be way overkill, asuming it even could do it. For thing like coffee machines, hairdryers etc. a PIC is a very good solution.
Mat Nieuwenhoven
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