IMHO the best bang-for-buck uP available right now is the ATTiny85. Luxurious 8K of program memory, 512 bytes RAM, 512 bytes flash, 4 ADC channels, 2 hardware PWM outputs, 20 MHz clock @ 5 volts.
Under a buck in quantity at Mouser:
Wait...how do you get 8K program memory and 512b of flash?
Not necessarily the best bang for the buck, but that NXP 8 pin ARM (or now, "arm") is intriguing.
Well, the Silicon Labs EFM88B goes for 15 cents in high volume
Not easy to make a all parts final judgement like this
Cheers
Klaus
Sorry, meant 512 bytes EEPROM!
8051 core? GROSS.
"Bang for buck" does not really make sense here. If your needs can be met with a 16-pin 4 MHz 8-bit device (or whatever), then the cheapest microcontroller that gives you this is the the "best bang-for-buck." If it is not enough for the job, then the price doesn't matter. If you really need 20 MHz performance, you can't just buy 5 of these 4 MHz devices even if that happens to be lower cost than one faster device.
Having said that, it is easy to see from Mouser that the ATTiny9 is $0.275 in quantity. It does less than the ATTiny85, but costs less. Is that better? It is certainly better bang-for-buck than the Silicon Labs EFM8B8, since it contains a sensible core and not an 8051 that should have been obsoleted thirty years ago.
But Mouser also has msp430 devices for $0.333, and these give a great deal more "bang" (at least in cpu power) than the AVR's - so lots more bang per buck.
They also show ARM devices down to $0.797 - /vastly/ more cpu bang for your buck.
And I know of ARM devices under $0.50 from proper distributors (Mouser is great for small quantities, but not the place to look for large quantity low price quotations).
Judging engineering by emotions again? That's ok, we all do it even when we think we are being logical.
-- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,dd on the centerline of totality since 1998
Hmmm, seems to me like all of you must have learned the "new" math. A buck is $1.00. None of these devices reach that level of performance.
-- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998
Pretty stout @ 50Mhz. Should suffice for small applications.
Not happy, use a PIC.
Cheers
Fine if you make singing greeting cards, or maybe even it could handle a toaster.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Also the fact AFAIK there's not a decent HLL compiler for that core you won't pay out the ass for. Hope you like asm...
You gotta buy in quantities of 2000 to get the msp430 at that price. I don't have that many bucks to spend on uCs.
For quantities of 100s rather than thousands, and when you have to do any kind of real work (instead of running a greeting card), the bargain-basement variety's piddly 512 bytes of program memory is going to be very confining.
I prefer the many excellent free tools for embedded CPUs. There is no shortage of Forth compilers for the 8051.
-- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998
I should have qualified it as "if you need to do any kind of real work." As another poster mentioned you can get msp430s for ~33 cents in thousands, with 512 bytes of program memory. That might be enough to run a greeting card.
The other advantage the newer products like AVR and ARM have over the older cores is that they have an ISA and architecture which was designed from the ground up to allow HLL compilers to generate tight code. There's no dedicated accumulator, nearly every register can also perform that function. And there are enough registers that the compiler can often decide to cache frequently-accessed variables there permanently so it never has to load/store them from RAM.
And yet they still function quite well. None of these issues are important by themselves. No one evaluates processors by measuring the details of code density or even performance per MHz. If a CPU will do the job it is a candidate. It may need more space for the code, but as long as a given price MCU will hold the app, it's a win!
-- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998
Back around 1999 I did the Footprints sensor with a PIC17C756, which had a capacious 16k of EEPROM and 902 bytes of RAM, counting the registers.
I still have some of them, and they worked last time I tried them (in about 2008, admittedly.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
I'm going to go completely the other way and suggest a GPU, like a Geforce whatever, since you get, what, a thousand CUDA cores for only a few hundred bucks. The GFLOPS/$ put everything else to shame.
Slow, 8 bit, scalar, non-pipelined processors? You've got to be kidding! ;-)
(Additional quibbles: no one makes microprocessors anymore; ATTiny is a microcontroller, meaning it's not exposed bus, but integrated peripherals. So your example isn't technically correct, by that quibble. :^) Apparently, you can run Linux on GPUs these days, but aside from video output, you don't have any other IO, so I guess a GPU card would be a uP of sorts -- it exposes a bus, so you need to add a few handy devices, and then you've got a full computer -- or, er well, millicontroller if you will, since it's not a single-chip solution after all.)
Keeping to a less edgy, more single-chip solution... anything related to cellphones will do the job: peripherals are included, as well as a handful of fast, efficient and cheap ARM cores. Some even have useful RAM included. All that for under $100, depending on where you get them from.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com "bitrex" wrote in message news:2fMnB.16621$QC2.4627@fx19.iad... > IMHO the best bang-for-buck uP available right now is the ATTiny85. > Luxurious 8K of program memory, 512 bytes RAM, 512 bytes flash, 4 ADC > channels, 2 hardware PWM outputs, 20 MHz clock @ 5 volts. > > Under a buck in quantity at Mouser: > >
512 bytes on any reasonable CISC processor is still several pages of assembly listing and a few pages of high level language listing.
You should be able to implement much more demanding applications than just greeting cards.
Nah, you've just been using Forth so long you've forgotten about floating point math. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.