XMOS XC-1 kits are shipping

They are supplying free libraries for all the usual peripheral functions. Doing stuff like that in software is much cheaper than using hardware, and easier in many ways.

Leon

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Leon
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Toying means nothing in our industry, it's all about rolling out actual product. That is what Inmos did. But:

The economics didn't have to look wrong. They were wrong because IMHO a cardinal mistake had been made: Entering the market with very high price tags. That was bound to fail and cause me to turn away. Same thing happened with S/C filter chips.

Next, they should have lined up an early licensing deal with a major semiconductor manufacturer, one that engineers trust. This is extremely important. Nobody in their right mind would design in a single-source part from a tiny manufacturer without a serious business track record. My guess is that a few more business-thinkers could have potentially saved the bacon at Inmos.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Reply to
Joerg

Bob wrote about XMOS:

Le> They are supplying free libraries for all the usual peripheral

Been there, done that, and it's not cheaper or easier when you consider the overall system cost impact, not just the "benefit" of leaving out the hardware block. That was the path Scenix/Ubicom went down, calling it "virtual peripherals", and it was not very successful. Ubicom has since added hardware for Ethernet, USB, etc. to their most recent parts. The reality is that a hardware Ethernet MAC costs less than the total system cost impact of the software alternative.

Eric

Reply to
Eric Smith

Going to market with an impractical product is much worse than toying and figuring out its impractical before you spend the big bucks. I remember when the Inmos people kept trying to sell their filter chip into a board I was doing. The board's BOM target was about 130 pounds (more or less met in the end), while their chip in 100k volume was something like 800 pounds. I guess the salesman had few other leads to follow if he kept wasting his time on us.

Regards, Steve

Reply to
steveu

That's exactly the cardinal mistake I mentioned above. Coming into the market with a totally unrealistic price is bound to fail. And it did.

Usually that happens after spending big bucks in NRE, it's all way behind schedule and the investors demand a rather quick and unrealistic ROI. Seen it many times, failed every single time. You should have seen some of the faces here when high-faluting chips were presented and then I told them that my discrete solution costs a buck fifty.

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Regards, Joerg

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Joerg

Not if you have four 400 MIPS cores on the chip, each with 64 bits of I/O, 64k of RAM, with 3.2 Gbit/s comms links between cores and 32 threads per core, with switching between threads in one clock. If the software is free, it is a very cost-effective solution, especially as the chips will be very cheap.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

e

The PC market solution to determinisity -

=09"If in doubt put bigger processor(s) and=20 =09 lots more memory to solve the 'problem'"

Having seen how easily screwed even software UARTs can get, and when something goes wrong all other activity is screwed.

The PC example is dodgy CD inserted, nothing else can work until the upto 30 seconds of lockout. Lots of other examples exist.

This sort of software emulation of hardware ONLY is useful for cheap and nasty commodity products that assume that unusability is always solved by a reset (for some products that means host PC AS WELL!).

This means for the VAST majority of my applications it is useless.

--=20 Paul Carpenter | snipped-for-privacy@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk PC Services Timing Diagram Font GNU H8 - compiler & Renesas H8/H8S/H8 Tiny For those web sites you hate

Reply to
Paul Carpenter

e

The PC market solution to determinisity -

=09"If in doubt put bigger processor(s) and=20 =09 lots more memory to solve the 'problem'"

Having seen how easily screwed even software UARTs can get, and when something goes wrong all other activity is screwed.

The PC example is dodgy CD inserted, nothing else can work until the upto 30 seconds of lockout. Lots of other examples exist.

This sort of software emulation of hardware ONLY is useful for cheap and nasty commodity products that assume that unusability is always solved by a reset (for some products that means host PC AS WELL!).

This means for the VAST majority of *my* applications it is useless.

--=20 Paul Carpenter | snipped-for-privacy@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk PC Services Timing Diagram Font GNU H8 - compiler & Renesas H8/H8S/H8 Tiny For those web sites you hate

Reply to
Paul Carpenter

How cheap? Have you seen any pricing info yet?

Reply to
Mike Harrison

Well, if you're already bought the MIPS, then you're correct, Leon, you might as well get some free peripherals out of it. This is certainly the case with PCs, where even a cheap box has a several GHz CPU and -- for 90+% of users -- has tons of free cycles sitting around that can be used for soft modems, sound card DSP, etc.

On the other hand, for embedded systems the best solution isn't always so clear-cut. Look at everyone using FTDI (or similar) USB to RS-232 chips with some dirt cheap low-end microcontroller -- often this approach is cheaper overall than using a "USB microcontroller," especially if the product volumes are low so development cost is significant. Or look at John Larkin's boxes -- he uses an Xport to turn Ethernet back into serial, since (presumably) overall it's cheaper/more effective than having one of his guys sit down and figure out how to add an Ethernet stack to his 68k-family CPUs. Even though the stack itself is surely freely available somewhere, the integration time is still significant.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

That's somewhat more on-chip resources and higher performance than we had at Ubicom, but it's also trying to do commensurately more sophisticated and higher performance functions in the software, so I don't expect it to actually work out any better than things did for Ubicom.

Software is NEVER free, even when someone is giving it away. You'll pay for it one way or another.

Eric

Reply to
Eric Smith

I'm also going to have to get myself one of those prestigious example.net email addresses like you have. I hear that they provide really good spam filtering. :-)

Reply to
Eric Smith

I've just received my XC-1 kit and have started playing with it. It comes with a nice demo that does interesting things with the LEDS, buttons and speaker, uses a UART, and includes a simple game.

The tools are open source, and work OK from the command line. The IDE uses Eclipse, and I can't seem to get an XC program to build properly, although a C program is OK.

Support on the Xlinkers forum is very good; I've asked a few questions there and an XMOS engineer has answered them in a few minutes.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

e

XMOS found a way to make their chips so cheap, that they can do everything cheaper in software than all others in hardware? Why don't they sell this revolutionary technology to semiconductor / FPGA companies then? They just wouldn't tell anyone about it and the same big Market would use it without knowing, but at lower prices.

Reply to
info2

I fully agree with this. Software is flexible and easier to correct than hardware. Unfortunantely this has lead to the current thinking that we can ship the product with known issues, since "We can always fix it later". In most cases these fixes never happen. I would prefer more peripherals in hardware, not less. TCP/IP stack in hardware, USB stack in hardware etc. Something like IEEE-1394 is much more reliable than USB, since all the enumeration etc is handled by the hardware. With the right hardware support, which can be a few gates, software can often be made much simpler, more robust and faster. A simple thing like an atomic increment or decrement can be quite complex to implement in software. In hardware it is trivial. In my experience from porting code written for old hardware, to new hardware. Calculation tasks are much faster on modern hardware. Moving data around between buffers, and peripherals is only a little bit faster if at all. Simple things like hardware that provides the amount of space available in a FIFO in a register in stead of just a FIFO has space flag, can easily make the moving of data easily 5x faster.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Reply to
Anton Erasmus

ike

nt

With chips anticipated to sell for as little as $1 each, and replacing FPGAs and DSPs in a lot of applications, I expect that the much larger established companies will be getting worried. XMOS already has several design wins, although the chips are not yet in full production.

I've just heard that free samples of the BGA512 chip and the newer BGA144 chip will soon be available via the XMOS web site. The latter is in an 11x11 mm package, and is identical to the larger device, apart from only having the I/O from two cores brought out. It should be possible to put it on a low-cost 4-layer board, which is something I'll be doing.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

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However, XMOS will be supplying fully tested and characterised "plug- in" software modules, which will get round the problems you mention. The XC language makes this very straightforward.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

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Seriously, how much are they paying you?

To be fair, the XMOS seems like a promising device, I might consider using it someday, but it still hasn't been widely tested in real designs.

How many MACs can it perform? Do you have benchmarks for FFTs, IIR filtering, FIR Filtering? What if you want to interface it to a DDR-II SDRAM module?

Best regards

Benjamin

Reply to
Benjamin Couillard

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Nothing! I just like the devices.

I'm still at the flashing LED stage. I'll ask those questions at the seminar next week. It can do a MAC in one cycle and it has all the usual DSP stuff in the instruction set but I'm not sure how they are accessed via the compilers.

I'll be adding a header to my board tomorrow, so that I can interface my own hardware to it easily.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

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Not yet. They have said that they will cost as little as $1 each. That's for the single-core chip, presumably. 400 MIPS for $1 isn't bad!

Leon

Reply to
Leon

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