My nightmare is that they will kill the power architecture line and will go all ARM, may be this is what this is all about - leaving power only behind closed doors for military etc. purposes, the rest of the world being left with access just to lower grade CPU technology.
Op Mon, 02 Mar 2015 08:50:26 +0100 schreef Dimiter_Popoff :
For automotive and other safety-critical applications, it is quite important that there are at least two Power vendors. It's a big market. What has NXP to gain from killing Power?
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I will pray you are right. It could have been worse of course, I don't think NXP have a history of "bye to kill" acts. They are not Intel, after all. At least let us hope so. And let us hope the Freescale longevity list promises will be kept after the deal goes ahead.
It's happened with other CPUs, before, so not unheard of (a processor hanging around in a MIL version, only)
First thing to look at is the customer base: how many customers and what sort of component volume. Then, the *types* of customers (lots of small customers can easily be shrugged off and diverted to another product offering).
They will also look at what that product line *costs* their other lines. No one wants to compete with themselves!
And, whether the PPC is unique enough to warrant carrying forward (because you have to also think about *new* offerings in a particular product line -- not just cranking out the same old devices)
If they're *just* buying the technology (instead of the *fab*, as well), I'd be a bit more concerned: how does the PPC's "process" fit with their (NXP's) existing process?
And, there's no way to know if someone has a hard-on for/against the product line deep inside the organization.
You might want to carefully parse their annual statement to stockholders to see what sort of language they use to describe the acquisition in justifying it to those "owners".
You may see individual offerings go away as they try to "focus" on whatever they consider "core"...
Note, however, that there are *lots* of very powerful offerings besides the PPC family devices. It's almost scary to see how *much* you can buy for how *little*!
Hopefully you won't have to test the "portability" of your VPA (?) ! :-/
--don
BTW, I sent you some photos a few weeks back (didi@)
In an ideal world this would be so of course. Yet buying a competitor just to shut them down is far from being unheard of, e.g. Intel have done it I am sure more than once (Chips and Tech comes to my mind now).
In this case we don't know anything yet, as Don suggested. Either NXP want to shut down the power line and replace it with ARM - which is by far an inferior architecture - or NXP want to have access/control to the power architecture.
We don't know how the new cores - the 5500 and the 6500 64-bit power cores and the new 32-bit one, e500mc IIRC, are doing. I have not seen any errata sheets for either - bad sign; but I have seen rev. B products announced - good sign.
Time will tell; I don't know what I will do if they leave me with no power architecture CPU-s, not that I could not port things to ARM but I will hate doing it, like having to use a horse cart after having used a car for decades. May be I'll become a taxi driver or a milkman, I wish I knew what I'd do.
Well yes, the thing is there is no other maker of power processors available on the market for non-politburo members (that is, things we can buy and work with without being a top 100 company). Let us just hope NXP want to develop this market, if this is the case they will likely leave things open (how else can they possibly be successful) as long as it is up to them.
I have never tried their devices (we only use a few PPC chips, and get them all from Freescale), but it doesn't look like they are only for big customers.
Did not know they had any. But the ones they have are too small/slow, now I use the 5200B (400 MHz G2 core, 10/100 Ethernet, DDR, ATA, PCI etc.) and I am eying the new 64 bit devices. Not exactly sure what end product I want to make with them yet but I certainly want to have DPS run on a multicore 64 bit machine for a start (the messy way things are going with linux etc. - anyone ever seen anything as crappy as android? - I may even have a chance to make a successful product for a market not as tiny/specialized as the nuclear spectrometry one).
I don't think Android is suitable for embedded systems, except perhaps when you need a nice gui but don't need high reliability. But embedded Linux is used on a wide range of systems, including high reliability systems. It's not nearly as efficient as a dedicated RTOS or your own system, but has plenty of uses nonetheless. And yes, there are always worse alternatives than Android, such as the appropriately named "Wince".
From the quick look at ST's site, it is mostly automotive PPC devices, and not multi-core devices at several hundred MHz. But at least it is a second source for some of these sorts of chips, and if FreeXP (or whatever) cuts down on them, then perhaps ST will ramp up their selection.
At that size I don't really care much about the core. I have never used a power core on such a small device, come to think of it. I would be fine with ARM as I am fine with Coldfire, TI DSP etc., there is no large programming effort for these small devices to think long term about (years and decades ahead). Things begin to matter when the entire DPS and the environment I work under need to be ported (yes I can live without a wintel or any other machine here and keep things going); last time I did it from 68k to power it took me about a year (mostly to write the first vpa compiler, had to figure out a lot of things I had never done before (assemble 68k sources for power object code had - has - not been done and I wanted to do it such that it would last, which it did for nearly
15 years now). Doing it yet again would be a lot easier but it would still be a huge effort. Which is why I am so paranoid about what is going to happen, I really want to have things run on a multicore 64 bit power machine... And there are a few very good looking - though yet to mature - choices on the QorIQ list.
Just read a post on a Bulgarian language forum - a guy based in Chicago has spoken to a Freescale rep who said it would take a year or two until things are clear, but may be they would sell the power architecture family. It is obvious what this "may be" said that early means.
So my worst fears have become reality after all. Time to think of a future as a taxi driver or as a milkman... Apparently the power family has become too powerful too be allowed for general public access - and I not a politburo member. The world had to go down the drain, hadn't it. I am not sure many people understand how the vast rift is between a power processor and any other, well, it is vast. True CPU technology is becoming classified - which will kill it altogether of course but try to tell that the people who are behind this, then they are not interested in what technology there _is_ but in what technology is out there not under their control.
Contrary to what seems to be a common belief I don't think it is very often that a company is bought just to shut down competing operations. It may be that the customers are more valuable than the technology, but clearly that does not apply in this case.
What is feasible is for operations to continue with minor changes to combine operations for efficiency or for competing product lines to be sold off. It will just be too expensive to buy a product line only to axe it.
So don't worry that the power line will be shut down. Instead consider that this may be an opportunity like when Intel sold off their StrongARM line after which it blossomed!
Thanks for the encouraging words, Rick. Let us hope for the best - that someone competent will buy the PPC line _and_ will keep it public. In fact the time it took for the new QorIQ lines to get truly going was longer than I had hoped, may be there just is some problem there (e.g. some key employee lost on that lost plane over the Indian ocean, someone who left them, someone who died etc.). So your hopes may be the best we have at the moment to rely on.... I'll pray you turn out to be right.
I think you are a bit paranoid about politics here - maybe you remember too much Bulgarian history! There is only one influential power to consider here, especially when talking about an American company like Freescale and a Dutch one NXP (if it is still Dutch) - money. If there is money to be made by making and selling PPC devices, FreeXP will continue to make and sell PPC devices.
Your biggest risk, I think, is that the PPC line will stagnate - if the key customers for the chips (automotive for the small and mid size devices, including some multicore, and networking for the big ones) move to other cores (ARM, MIPS, x86), then the development of new devices will fade away. But historically, Freescale has been very good at continuing to produce devices long after they have gone out of fashion. They still make 68332 chips, a good ten years after they tried to move customers over to Coldfire or MPC so that they could shut down those production lines. They still have plenty of Coldfire devices, and still have good support for them, even though they are mostly gone from new developments.
You may also find that new PPC devices don't make it into the mainstream, but will only be available for a few special customers. It's not politics - the customers will be automotive and networking companies. But releasing a component to general use means a good deal more documentation, sample code, development tools, marketing, etc., than releasing it to a specific high-volume customer. I once worked on a board that would use a brand new PPC microcontroller - my FAE got me samples long before they were publicly available because the same device had existed in automotive version for a couple of years. (If you don't have a good Freescale FAE from a good distributor, get one - they can keep you informed here.)
On 04.3.2015 ?. 10:05, David Brown wrote:> On 03/03/15 17:54, Dimiter_Popoff wrote: > ...... >> >> So my worst fears have become reality after all. Time to think of a >> future as a taxi driver or as a milkman... Apparently the power >> family has become too powerful too be allowed for general public >> access - and I not a politburo member. >> The world had to go down the drain, hadn't it. I am not sure many >> people understand how the vast rift is between a power processor >> and any other, well, it is vast. True CPU technology is becoming >> classified - which will kill it altogether of course but >> try to tell that the people who are behind this, then they are >> not interested in what technology there _is_ but in what technology >> is out there not under their control. >> > > I think you are a bit paranoid about politics here - maybe you remember > too much Bulgarian history! There is only one influential power to > consider here, especially when talking about an American company like > Freescale and a Dutch one NXP (if it is still Dutch) - money. If there > is money to be made by making and selling PPC devices, FreeXP will > continue to make and sell PPC devices.
Hah, may be you are right and I am too paranoid - or may be I am right and you are too naive, who knows :-). The thing is, we can't possibly tell - all we know is what we are told...
Obviously I would dearly want to be the wrong one.
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