Ulf, what of these new AVRs? :)

They are called vapourware. They are available when they are available. Whatever this means.

Rene

Hello Rene,

You mean testing market interest without having any product? That would be a recipe to alienate the customer base. With TI's MSP430 at least they usually have samples when they post the specs. Sometimes even before the specs are complete.

Regards, Joerg

Pity, because the 256 price is approx. the price of the old mega128L - which makes me hope strongly that the 1280/1281 will be cheaper.

You can both be right :)

When they are (eventually) released, you can expect them to be cheaper.

Higher code sized AVRs are also under price pressure from the many ARMs.

-jg

I may be able to turn the ATmega256/2560s/1281s etc. I have into smoke, but I am not sure I know how to turn them into vapour... The 2561 was the first part to be available and the others are following. It simply takes time from first silicon to full production so Rene is right, they are available (at Digikey) when they are available.

Pricing is market driven...

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

I was looking at this very issue the other week for a project that is currently in a mega128 at 8MHz. I need more CPU horsepower, and more RAM would be very helpful; I was going to just zip up to 16MHz but looked around for other options. I'm currently paying this:

ATMEGA128-16AI 128K flash/4K RAM/4K EEPROM/48 IO/10ADC/16MHz $15.05 qty 1 $8.75 qty 100

I can buy: AT91SAM7S256-AU-001 256K flash/64K RAM/32 IO/55MHz $12.04 qty 1 $7.28 qty 100

or LPC2129FBD64-S 256K flash/16K RAM/46 IO/10ADC/60MHz $10.68 qty 1 $8.52 qty 100

The cost difference at the qty 100 price is almost all eaten by the need to buy external EEPROM or ADCs, plus the different code density means I don't get 2x advantage out of the 256K flash.

why not the LPC213x? for the specs you gave they're cheaper.... Or the TMS470?

Are you using that much FLASH for data or code? If it's for data (const tables, strings and so on...), maybe you could use something like an LPC2103 + M25P40 or something similar...

It's code. Ideally I'd like 256+K of flash, at least 6 slow A/Ds, 16K of RAM and hardware SPI and I2C (both usable simultaneously, not muxed onto the same pins).

How about the LPC2146 ? - Shows at Digikey $10.68 1+, and it has

256KF / 40K (!) RAM, Dual i2c, Dual SPI, Dual UART, 16 ADC, 1 DAC and you can just pretend it does not have the USB block :) [Tho I'm sure you can find _some_ use for it, even if it is just product testing or debug...]

-jg

You should be able to order samples of the ATmega2561 though...

The AT91SAM7S128/256 will do all of this (64 kB of RAM). The SPI is running at the same clock as the CPU up to 30 Mhz or so. If you are code size limited, and thus want to run in Thumb Mode you are faster than the LPC.

2 clocks flash access vs 3 clock access in non-sequential fetch and random data accesss Both support 1 clock cycle in sequential fetch.

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

But,

- You have a fast, 32 bit processor

- you don't have to jump though hoops to use constant data efficiently (strings, tables etc).

--

John Devereux

Yeah, right. I never heard of anyone in anything less than a Fortune 50 company getting samples out of Atmel. You can order until your fingers are worn to the bone, but you won't get so much as an email.

You're correct that _I_ could go to my day job and call the Atmel rep and say "I've got a personal project that could use a few samples". However I don't mix business and pleasure like that - I keep my personal fun projects at a very distant arm's length from my employer.

The average small person has more chance of being elected President than of getting a single ATtiny11 sample.

It is with slight shame that I state that my projects over about 16K of object code have very little assembly language in them. My mega128 project is 106K of object code and only about 200 bytes of that (a time-critical ISR) is assembly language. So I'm distanced (somewhat) from these issues.

On 14/01/2006 the venerable Ulf Samuelsson etched in runes:

Ulf, please tell me where in the UK. I requested samples of ATmega2561 from G D Technik in June last year and there's still no sign of them.

. . .

--
John B

(with the ARMs:)

Hmm.. I would have thought both issues would then be even *more* important! Particulary the constant data issue can be a pain if your code contains a lot of it. You have to embed non-portable constructs throughout your code in order to keep the constant data out of RAM.

--

John Devereux

I think the only const data in my code is a CRC table and a 200-byte crypto key.

See:

Do engineers have long memories? Yes.

--- Posted in January, 2005:

Some time ago, in a case of regarding Atmel samples when I was wanting to evaluate their use, I actually ordered two samples from Atmel of a new part through my local distributor. In this case, I explained our estimated volumes and general application area to both the distributor as well as to our local Atmel FAE, directly. I had already read that Atmel (on their site) was nearly ready for sampling on the AT91FR40162-66CI, so although I expected some delay I didn't expect the 10 months I experienced. My request letter went to All American in late February, that year. The response from Atmel (looking up my email now to refresh my memory), a few weeks later, said,

"Atmel's AT91FR40162-66CI will be available as samples sometime in April or May."

In April, I was told by my distributor,

"Atmel came back on the AT91FR40162-66CI and advised that samples would be available sometime in May."

On the phone, in late May, I was told that it wouldn't be until late July. And then in June, I was told in writing,

"I was advised this morning that the production schedule slipped and the samples will not be available around the 24th of July."

July became August, August became September, and then in late September, I spoke again with the FAE after some phone calls on my part in early September. This time, the FAE started grilling me even more on our application details and wanting to know "numbers" and how "certain" I could be of them. More, he was now also asking if I really needed them before November.

By this time, I have to admit I wasn't really caring nearly as much. We were near the end of September and I had pretty much set the possible use of their chip aside. It was still remotely possible we could use it for a different project, though, so I told him that I'd prefer it before November and disclosed my frustrations up to this point in time.

Keep in mind that I *had* disclosed to them an expected annual purchase, early on, of about 5000/yr. This was a pretty accurate figure, since we were already shipping those quantities for a version we were replacing.

I finally received the two parts in December, shortly before Christmas.

Needless to say, I've not specified any Atmel parts and I'm not planning to.

--
Jon

Atmel does treat big people very well, which is presumably how they get away with this. The reason I said I know _I_ could get samples, if they exist, is because other SBUs in my company use tens of thousands of AVRs of various breeds, and Atmel is trying very hard to get a foot in the door of my SBU. I want to design them in because they're much easier to work with than the COP and NEC 78K series (which is what we have in the products right now) and also considerably cheaper (dollar-per-feature) at our "family" price. I could promise about half a million pieces a year on some of our projects, too - which is enough to get any rep out of his chair :)