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How to decide Intel or Motorola

Hello Embedded Gurus ,

I am trying to find out how to choose hardware for embedded application Intel pentium or Motorola powerpc etc .Are there any general guide lines depending up on the nature of the application to chose one over the other ? Or each one of them do they target a particular type of industry segment and hence are more suitable for that segment . I would appreciate if any body can throw some light on this .

Ours is a reasonably compex embedded application which does some real time dataacquistion and control has to operate on industrial environment , has to have support for web interface , data logging etc . We are currently having qnx os on intel pentium for our development , can any body throw some light as to how the development would be on powerpc and how it would perform as compared to intel , what are the advantages / disadvantages of one over the other .

Thanks in advance

-subra

Reply to
Subrahmanyam Arya
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Reply to
david lindauer

If you want enough heat to fry eggs, and an unlimited energy budget, definitely go with Intel. All the development tools you need for either are free and freely available, and development can be done on any platform.

My experience is that Intel processors require more hardware to get out of bed, and require both more RAM and ROM to get any job done, and a lot faster clock. (To those of you who wish to argue, remember it's *my* experience.)

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Reply to
Kevin D. Quitt

What analysis have you already performed that detemined you narrow the choice down to these two families? Neither of these is particularly well suited to conventional data acquisition, this being more the realm of microcontrollers. The powerPc would be the closer of the two in this respect. Even the smallest 8 bit micro can be web enabled, amny would handle data acquisition better than either of your choices, but there are, of course a wide range of microcontrollers with various 'power' ranges.

Al

Subrahmanyam Arya wrote:

Reply to
onestone

We are using the MPC855T and the MPC852T for data/networking communications. These are from the PowerQUICC I family. Here are the reasons we chose to go with Motorola:

  1. Intel tends to obsolete products after a few years. If your product life cycle is longer than that, this can get to be a problem. Motorola keeps their embedded processors around for decades. Intel's embedded group is starting to change that, but we felt Moto was more reliable anyway.
  2. The PowerQUICC family is easily scalable. If we find that we need more processing ability, we can scoot up the product tree to the PowerQUICC II family.
  3. We can choose what peripherals we need to optimize cost. There are enough variants in the product line to keep you from paying extra for features that you aren't going to use.
  4. Power consumption. Who wants to worry about all of that heat in an already hot industrial environment? This also simplifies the power supply and enclosure design.

You really need to determine what features you need, and perform a cost analysis WRT the candidate processors.

One caveat about the external bus on a Moto part, there is no asynchronous wait signal...so If you're external hardware needs one, be prepared to impliment a state machine in hardware somewhere...

Elroy

Reply to
Elroy the Seedy Impaler

If you're going stick with QNX, you will probably be best off sticking to your current architecture. If you want to move over to PowerPC, you should select one of the targets they already support. It's hard to justify the amount of time and effort it takes to port QNX to custom hardware.

Reply to
Dingo

Yeah, power consumption. If you don't mind shoving a fan and a huge heatsink on you CPU - if you have the space, go for x86, unless you hate the assembly - like a lot of people, yuck!

If you want low power, ARM/StrongARM/MIPS and then PPC would be the CPU of choice. What is the housing of the machine going to be like? Is it going to be inside a big warehouse with lots of air flow? Or is it really going to be tightly packed together into a small area with not a lot of air flow?

But then you really need to decide what kind of application you want to design.

Do you really need 64-bit? If not, you don't really need the higher MIPS chips.

Do you really need 32-bit? If not you can forget about x86, higher 68k's etc.

Do you really need 16-bit? Lower 68k's are usable here, otherwise you'll probably want to go with 6800 or 6502 or 8088 (eek).

Do you need floating point? An MMU (probably if you want to use QNX)?

You've already mentioned that you're using QNX, so you''l have to decide on power consumption really, (and yes I know there are lower power x86's like the VIA chips).

Luke.

Reply to
Luke A. Guest

I forgot Hitachi's SuperH processor, which is quite nice.

Luke.

Reply to
Luke A. Guest

Cost depends very much on what you buy: x86 will be cheaper than PPC since it's a mass market; however, a PPC *CHIP* will cost less than an x86 *BOARD*. You have to balance cost of design (can be VERY expensive if you use a high-end CPU) and cost of manufacturing (labor and meterials). Of course, you may have other considerations like form factor, power and cooling requirements etc, forcing you one way or the other.

In general, I'd say that selecting CPU family depends on the buy/build decision and not the other way around: designing an x86 board is a pain, (unless you stay with the 486 or lower), finding and buying a PPC board to match your needs is hard and expensive.

Reply to
Assaf Sarfati

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