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Freescale is Competing with ST for Poor Website of the Week Award

I like some things about the Freescale web site. I have found some useful overviews and it does not entirely get in the way of accessing information. But just like every semiconductor company, they need to learn the difference between marketing and engineering. This time I am not complaining about the marketeers spouting on without saying anything as is usually the case.

I wanted to check up on the status of their development tools for the new Kinetis parts. I searched their site and found a page with a long list of part numbers and little explanation. That is par for the course from Freescale. I saw a link and thought, "Ah, a video may be just the ticket this time, even if I have to listen to a bunch of marketing". But I was oh so wrong. The video shows a person who is obviously an engineer and not an FAE, in fact he says he is an application engineer. I would say this guy has never met a customer before in his life.

This presentation was abysmal and didn't even meet the minimal standards of communicating with engineers! The guy mumbles, rattles off lists of part numbers (the same ones I saw on the web page). I swear he actually spoke a sentence that included nothing but initials! He proceeds to instruct assembly of the tower (of which every part number seems to start with TWR-) in a way that I can't understand what he is saying.

Some of the alphabet soup is not really his fault, but do they have to use full part numbers for everything rather than using their descriptive names? Wouldn't "K40 processor board" be easier to understand than the "Tee doubleU aRe - Kay 4tX256", much less easier to say?

Maybe I'm just getting old... well, there's no question about that actually... but can't people use a little common sense in doing their jobs? Do they really think having this guy mumbling part numbers in a

7 minute video is the right way to explain how their development system works? Maybe I need to buy one of their systems, do my own video and then sell it to them...!

I really want to learn about this development system, but I keep falling asleep and I'm not sure he is actually going to tell me about it rather than how to plug the "you ess bee cable into the oh ess bee dee em port".

Anyone know what a TWR-SER board is? Is SER short for serial and it has all the comms I/O that is left off of the processor board?

Ok, I went ahead and listened to the whole video and sure enough, he never really explains anything about the system. He just runs you through a lightning tour of assembling the the cube and running an example app on it using the debugger. I don't think I got one full part number and I know I couldn't hear what to do to use the software. I think they told him his pay check would get smaller the longer he talked.

Rick

Reply to
rickman
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I have been using almost exclusively their processors over the years (except for a TI DSP) since the 80-s and have been happy so far with my choices. But the current development is really frightening, hopefully something will happen to change that trend.

The site is *full* of vaporware, all that QORIQ stuff none of which is on sale for years now after being announced (nor is any of these documented). On top of that, they seem to think it is a good idea to jump on the ARM bandwagon - like there is any space left on it for newcomers. That exactly when *their* processes are already good enough to have power architecture (PPC) cores compete with ARM ones on portables - and they _do have_ these cores, way ahead of any ARM.

One can only hope for the best, I guess - none of which is in sight at the moment...

BTW, the fact they spill plenty of marketing info instead of the technical data you have been after means they either don't have the data or don't want to release it. It is quite easy to locate data on a product if they have it and want it made public.

Dimiter

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Reply to
Didi

There's no such jumping-on happening at TI, and hasn't been for quite a while. They've been sitting in the front row of that band wagon for most a bit over a _decade_ by now. Viz the OMAP platform in its millions of incarnations. TI created their own implementation of an ARM core, for crying out loud.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

M

Hmm, are you sure you don't need to reread the message you are replying to....

Dimiter

Reply to
Didi

Le 06/03/2011 21:03, Hans-Bernhard Bröker a écrit :

So TI should not claim they embed ARM Core in their processors ... BTW how did they call it ?

Reply to
Habib

Nowadays, they can. They've apparently gone back from their own core to plain ARM9 cores.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

Le 08/03/2011 00:26, Hans-Bernhard Bröker a écrit :

I remember the late StrongARM and xscale Intel lines based on ARM arch, so far i didn't heard something equivalent on TI µC-DSP portfolio.

Reply to
Habib Bouaziz-Viallet

d.

o

I don't follow. TI had the ARM7 CPU that they originally sold to the automotive market and didn't sell generally. That was the TMS470. They later worked with higher performance ARMs like the 11 which is what they combined with their DSP and specialized peripherals like Video for using in PDAs and such as the OMAP. Only recently, instead of working on a CM3 version of an ARM CPU, they bought Luminary Micro and added dozens of processors to their product line. None of these were "their own core". What exactly do you mean by that? Are you saying that they didn't use ARM sourced IP to design the ARM 11 chips?

Rick

Reply to
rickman

Why not? If they licensed the ARM-whatever architecture from ARM and implement it, why can't they say it's an ARM-whatever core?

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Reply to
Grant Edwards

At the risk of continuing a thread-hijack,

Then how do you explain their continuous references to getting their core from ARM Inc?

... processor ... developed by ARM ...

Reply to
NeedCleverHandle

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