I looked at Hyperstone several times but I cannot see a clear benefit over other modern structures like ARM. The greatest problem is that Hyperstone is like the japanese manufacturers. If you know what I mean. If you want to build a camera controller or such thing it's maybe a good choice. For hobbyists oder small firms I think it's better to use common architectures.
- Henry
Robert Kaiser schrieb in Nachricht ...
remote
Although ARM will be increasingly used in many electronic appliances, there are plenty of applications where much lower-cost processors will suffice, ussually much cheaper ones than 8051 et al.
On the other hand, the price of ARM chips will continue to drop as the technology improves. The Philips ARM chip is around $5 in quantity now. In three years expect it to break $2 with less memory if the market continues to develop. Compare to the price of the Cygnal 8051 chips!
Of course you don't need an ARM to control your microwave. But many 8 bit apps will be done with 32 bit chips in the near future because they can offer more features for the same system price.
-- Rick "rickman" Collins rick.collins@XYarius.com Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY removed. Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com 4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
What makes you think that 4 and 8 bit processors aren't going to continue to drop in price as well?
I suppose if dice shrink (and wafer yields rise) to the point where the packaging cost completely dominates the silicon/IP cost, then it won't really matter whether there's a 4/8/16/32 bit processors. When you ask for a price quote, all they have to ask you is "how many pins?"
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Where's th' DAFFY
at DUCK EXHIBIT??
visi.com
Exactly as you say below, at some point the price of the package and testing dominates. There will always be a price advantage with a smaller chip, but if you can add features, even ones unrelated to the product, there will be reason to spend an extra $0.10 cent for the bigger chip. An example of that is the games that come on cell phones. They have nothing to do with using a cell phone, but they make the product sell better and so they are worth a few cents.
Maybe your microwave would work better if it sang to you as it cooked?
-- Rick "rickman" Collins rick.collins@XYarius.com Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY removed. Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com 4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
In article , Alex Gibson writes
or professional companies...
Initial cost of a tool is not the same as the cost of ownership over time.
You may be working in a company where time is not important, nor the size, speed, efficiency and reliability of the code.
The size of the company has no bearing on the tools you need. I know many one man outfits who use some very expensive tools because they are the right tool that produces fast compact and above all reliable code. As one said to me the other day he does not have time to play about making up for unreliable tools. they need to work correctly without a lot of messing about.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/\ /\/\/ snipped-for-privacy@phaedsys.org
In article , rickman writes
I will bet a years salary you are wrong.
in some cases but not in the majority.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/\ /\/\/ snipped-for-privacy@phaedsys.org
Brave move. rickman just said less memory, and did not give the qty column :). Mask ROM devices could easily get sub $2.
DSP devices are doing this already - FLASH for development and medium volumes, and ROM for high volume products, needing stable code in both senses of the term.
-jg
cannot be justified.
chips will always be
$.10 at a million pieces is $100,000. When it comes to large qty, and low resale prices, a dime is a lot of money!
If your designing a greeting card that plays a recorded voice, or a little song when you open the cover, $.10 is a fortune in parts.
If your building a little piece of swag jewelry that blinks a little pattern of LEDs around a company logo, that your going to be giving away at a trade show, $.01 is a lot of money!
Things like keyboard controllers for alarm system pads, power monitoring in power supplies, LCD controllers, remote controls, computer mice, a remote temperature sensor that sends nothing but a temperature back to a main processor, don't need 32 bit processors, and to spend even a penny more on one would be a foolish business decision.
I was once contracting for a company that was working with one of the major remote control manufactures that OEM most of the remotes for cable boxes. They wouldn't blink until you talked about qty's of 1 million and to get their attention, and a decent amount of support you need to be talking in 10's of millions. At $.10 that's $1,000,000. At that kind of savings you can afford to pay someone a years salary to learn to code in assembly language. They used a
6805 variant, with *very* tight assembly language coding using very heavy compression to fit as many codesets as possible into the smallest amount of memory. A penny in production cost could save them $100k on a run of 10mil.But again to make you're point, sometimes 32 bit is desirable, the company I was contracting with was talking about putting an ARM processor in the remote. They wanted two way communications with a menu built into the remote, the end goal was to allow advertisements to be sent to the remote's display. It was an evil plan...but it paid my mortgage! As a side note, I had the whole thing working in the 6805 8-bit processor, it wasn't until they wanted to add a scripting language and advertising "applets" (and the memory addressing needed for these) that they did a redesign to an ARM. This remote was to be heavily subsidized by advertising money, so cost wasn't as important as it is for the $9 One For All remote you can buy at a drugstore. BTW: They finally did go into production but I have no idea what processor they ended up with:
Really? So who's writing the "C" compilers that must generate the assembly language code? (And understand it well enough to write decent optimizers?) There will be assembly language programmers in 15 years, for the simple fact a I know a bunch of under 30 year old assembly language programmers now. It seems unlikely they're all going to die in 15 years. ;-)
There's always going to be a need for something to do nothing but count the number of things that has passed it on an assembly line and send that information back to some other CPU. Using Linux, with the ability to play DOOM-7 is always going to be overkill for this...
-Zonn
-------------------------------------------------------- Zonn Moore Zektor, LLC
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Erm, no, I respectfully think that you have that one bass-ackwards. The reason there are games on cellphones is because digital phones needed a fairly frisky CPU and plenty of memory for DSPizing and realtime data processing, crypto, etc and someone realized that this hardware could be used for an occasional frivol, being totally unused while there is no call in progress.
With the modern genre of phones, this has come one step further because marketing has looked at the possibility of selling downloadable software with a view to someday making cellular service providers turn a profit. But the feature was initially a side-effect. I even recall interviews with Nokia engineers who said as much.
Having worked in electronic toys and consumer appliances for most of my recent career, I can say categorically that $0.10 per chip is often money wasted, and practically always money marketing will NOT permit you to spend, unless it is for a feature that is specifically required to implement some bullet point off the product roadmap. For low-volume projects, other factors dominate, of course.
I don't think you understand my point. I am not talking about some frill that an engineer wants to add. I am saying that marketing always wants to put more into a product. If the incremental cost is very low, then those "frills" will start to be added.
Of course no one will use a 32 bit processor in a greeting card as you see them today. But when the cost is low enough to allow, you will see
32 bit processors in even disposable things like digital ink newspapers.The issue in the cell phone is that the game takes up code storage space. That is an added cost unless you say "there is spare space". But at some point of cell phone development that game pushed the size of the flash up to the next notch or required another round of code reduction to make it all fit. Nothing is free, but often the cost is low enough.
-- Rick "rickman" Collins rick.collins@XYarius.com Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY removed. Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com 4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
Especially since he doesn't know what I make a year...
-- Rick "rickman" Collins rick.collins@XYarius.com Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY removed. Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com 4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
Hi,
What's wrong with GCC?
It is absolutely everything but unreliable, the chance that bugs are found and eradicated is very high, because it is used much more than most commericial compilers (possibly except MS stuff, but I wouldn't call that better)
Another advantage of GCC is that it is portable between architectures, if you decide to switch to another processor or playform you can still use gcc. You'd have to buy and port all your code when using a CPU or platform dependent commercial compiler.
I can't think of any disadvantages of GCC except it is quite difficult to set up. Once setup it works like a charm though..
Wumpus
No, I don't think you understand MY point :) The marketroids - let's take toys for instance - have a range of trucks, say, nd they want to add one more product to that range. They come to the design people, who make a huge list of possible features. The engineers implement a prototype with some subset - perhaps a large subset - of those features. The marketing people then say "Great! Now make it for $x, and take out whatever features are required to achieve that!". This is not theory, it's bitter experience of how the mass-market consumer electronics industry works (except for very small companies). You simply cannot persuade marketing people to throw in extra features after the fact unless they are /literally/ free.
$0.10, by the way, is a massive cost factor in an electronic toy. I have spent upwards of two weeks trying to find a way to use two $0.0025 resistors instead of one $0.05 capacitor (in a toy with SRP $12.95), the end effect of which was to cut out the entire feature that required this capacitor, rather than spend $0.05. I can project from this that in a $79.95 microwave oven, a $0.10 BOM increase is still very significant, and days will cheerfully be spent to shave it out.
--
-- Lewin A.R.W. Edwards
It's all about profit in high volume stuff (toys, greeting cards, etc), when 32 bit processors are the same price or cheaper, and are the same size or smaller, and use the same power or less, than 8 bit processors, then 8 bit processors will go away. Otherwise there will be niches that 8 bit processors will fill over 32 bits. (As there are still niches being filled by 4 bit processors, though I'm sure they are becoming more and more scarce.)
One thing I can think of that has worked this way is memory. Because of mass-production, it's cheaper to use a 32k RAM part than a 2k RAM part, assuming you can even find a 2k part (or even 32k for that matter!).
It could be processors will go the way of memory in price, but unless they can build 32 bits smaller, and have them use less power than 8 bits, there will probably be applications where spending *more* money for an 8 bit processor would be a requirement.
NASA, for instance, would probably place more emphasis on its current consumption budget over a processor's ability to play Tetris using its spare computational power. So even pricing won't necessarily kill the 8 bit processor.
-Zonn
-------------------------------------------------------- Zonn Moore Zektor, LLC
Remove the ".AOL" from the email address to reply.
Very little, however it is not the be-all-and-end-all.
It's rarely the best compiler for smaller micros. In my experience, on anything with (roughly) less than about four general-purpose registers capable of holding addresses or natural-sized integers, you're better off with a compiler that's been crafted with the constraints of the architecture in mind - there's too much juggling otherwise for it to be time- and space-efficient. (e.g. the gcc ports for HC11/HC12).
It's also rarely the best compiler for very powerful micros - for example, Intel's own compiler eats it alive on high-end x86, in my experience, since Intel can afford to put a lot of chip-specific peephole optimisations into their own toolchain. (And do a hell of a lot of expensive dataflow analysis).
GCC is quick to port, generates tolerable code on most common 32-bit architectures, and comes with a lot of useful tools. It's capable of keeping most 32-bit RISCS fed and watered quite nicely.
Bugs in the core of GCC will be hunted down and slain quickly. Bugs in ports - whether ports to a new host system or back-ends for a new processor - might linger for some time.
See above. For most platforms it's a good solution. For some it isn't. For others it's good but there are better ones...
One size never fits all, at least not perfectly.
pete
-- pete@fenelon.com "there's no room for enigmas in built-up areas" HMHB
I understand. But an $80 microwave is not a $13 toy. The toy is planned with a well defined set of features that fit the price window. A microwave will have more flexibility to *plan in* features if the cost is not significant. How many microwaves do you find that *don't* have a menu of standard foods or other features that could be left out and still not impact the basic funtion of a microwave? The cheapest one I see in Walmart still has those features. I expect the couple of extra pads on the keypad alone increase the cost by $0.10.
But enough. There will always be products that do not have *any* use for a 32 processor no matter how small the incremental cost. Just as we still have 4 bit apps now when the cost difference is very slight. But clearly the trend will change as the cost of the 32 bit parts comes down. I expect the 8 bit parts will only dominate for a few more years.
-- Rick "rickman" Collins rick.collins@XYarius.com Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY removed. Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com 4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
32 bit processors, as used today, usually need quite a few support processors.
An intel based PC for example:
Base processor: A 32 bit (64 bit?) 80x86 derivative.
Support processors (of unknown bitsize)
Keyboard controller inside motherboard (usually hidden in a chipset now days). Keyboard controller inside keyboard. Monitor control (OSD, autosync, etc) Modem Display card (possibly more powerful than the base processor in many ways) Hard disk. CD rom. Printer. Newer speaker systems with digital volume controls and USB support. Mouse Network routers, switches, hubs, etc. Now days stupid stuff like fan controllers w/digital temperature readout...
Counting the main processor used to write this post, I just counted 24 working CPUs on my desktop. (Includes a couple of HP calculators, 3 remote controls, a wireless desk phone (1 CPU in the handset, 1 in the base), etc, etc...
It's incredible the number of places you find CPU's now days! Someone of 20 years ago might have made the argument: CPU's will never be as cheap as discrete logic, they'll always draw more current, and be more expensive. And they would have been wrong, so I know where you're going with this!
It's not hard to see why currently, small processors, outsell the larger ones by a good margin, at least qty wise (according to the Mouser distributor at my last job), I'm sure the gap is smaller dollar wise.
But then using the "discrete" .vs. "CPU" analogy you can predict that processors are going to get more and more powerful for the same price/performance ratio, and part of this is going to be an increase in the internal data path and register size.
Someday the cheapest, most energy efficient way to blink an LED, just may be with a 32 bit processor and a battery. And hopefully google will have archived your original post so you can say "I told you so!". ;-)
-Zonn
-------------------------------------------------------- Zonn Moore Zektor, LLC
Remove the ".AOL" from the email address to reply.
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