hefty data sheet

It seems to be specified on page 11 of the data sheet as an AMD "Sitara Processors Multicore SoC architecture platform".

It's not an exact acronym, but close enough to make it likely that this is what they had in mind.

Texas Instruments used to leave inconvenient details out of their data sheets, but when the .pdf format made it practical for them to publish huge data sheets they seem to have opted for burying them in a heap of verbiage.

It is a small furry creature that lives behind piles of junk in garages and garden sheds. Capable of incredible speed, so it is never observed, it grabs dropped components and hides them in inacessible places to use as nest-building material during the mating season.

I need a printed copy to put on someone's desk when they says "8 bit is obsolete, just use an ARM"

If you print on both sides, the stack will be about 2 feet high. Better buy some toner things.

It would take an army of engineers to use a chip like that. That would need a giant market.

why would that multicore monster be relevant to that in any way?

Not something special, just a very good datasheet (?). Others just split this into numerous parts -- reference manuals, programmers' manuals, etc. It is still as big as this one, just split into multiple parts. Some of those parts are forgotten to put on their websites, some wrapped in numerous NDAs, some forgotten to write at all soit makes very difficult to get the whole picture. We are working with e.g. Rockchip RK3568 right now that is not any simpler. There IS documentation but it is dispersed over numerous websites so it takes a lot of effort to find a detailed manual on some parts and one never knows where it can be found. No army of engineers here, just requires knowledge and expertise. Just remember, those are NOT el-cheapo microcontrollers running some RTOS at most. Those are full-blown systems that usually run Linux kernel which is an enormous thing in itself.

It is very good to have everything in one place. If you look at the TI's documentation on their DSPs you'll find that it is even bigger. Just split into tens of documents on particular subsystems so if you want to program e.g. PWM you should search for a specific documents on PWM subsystem.

The real horror is NXP with their iMX8xyz. They have enormous datasheets (? they usually called Reference Manuals while the datasheet only has pinouts and electrical specs) with hundreds of pages copypasted from various IP documents VERBATIM that takes a lot of space and almost absolutely useless. Useless because they don't bother telling you how those IPs are built into their devices, which signals are used, how these signals are mapped to other parts and package pins, how they can be accessed by the software (register mapping) and so on. Their documents are enormous with half of their bulk is totally useless and many parts are missing at all. And nobody there has any knowledge of those. Everything was great while it was Freescale but turned to total disaster when they were acquired by NXP.

Perhaps they are trying for the Guinness Book of Records? Longest meaningless datasheet.

I think there is a lot of duplication from a (very) quick scan. IOW the authors were paid by the word.

Don't you guys simply look for another chip if the manual is too much to digest?

I would.

Jeroen Belleman

That part was recommended to me by our TI rep. I have no interest in even reading the manual, much less trying to design something with it.

I like simple, like an RP2040 and an Efinix T20.

It piqued my curiosity.

Most of the fancy chips these days have long and large manuals. (some much better structured than others)