Intel copies Arduino

Find another place to work.

I can imagine that happening but haven't seen it personally. Management may want a good justification but that shouldn't be hard if it's truly a problem. OTOH, the experienced people should do the job right, up front.

Of course, things change but that should be a good justification.

A few thousand dollars for a hardware debugger? In the '80s, maybe. Every one I see now is sub-$1000, usually an order of magnitude less. ...cheap enough to buy on spec, with a spare.

They keep trying to pawn them off on us but they're 5x more expensive than the competition. They do include a lot of tools and middleware but there is zero interest in either of that. We're not interested in giving up any IP to Intel, and then our competition.

We use them, too, but I thought we were talking about the popcorn stuff in this thread (competitive with 8051, PIC, or AVR). My confusion. We have no hardware debuggers at this level. It's all done on the target hardware (almost always over USB or Ethernet).

Sorta how I feel about software. ;-)

OK, this was the confusion.

They don't charge us. Very companies do. It's a matter of their upside potential. ;-)

OK, that makes sense. No one wants to work for nothing (no matter what some congressmen think).

No doubt some will. ;-)

The only thing worse is having it done badly. I have no trouble doing myself. That's what I do. ;-)

How often have they actually sued a tool supplier? It seems incredibly stupid.

Preach it!

Way ahead of you on that one. :)

I don't quite understand this. Do you mean that if you used an Atom, competitors can understand the basic design sooner, and therefore reverse engineer it sooner?

I agree it would be really weird for somebody to charge thousands (or even hundreds) for a hardware debugger for M0/8051/PIC/AVR type stuff. One of the selling points of some of these chips is that they have a "simple" debugging interface.

As long as the hardware guy hooks up enough wires between the little square black things, all is OK. Sometimes he runs the Gigabit Ethernet into square black thing 1, and then connects I2C from SBT 1 to SBT 2. When I'm writing the code for SBT 2, I catch hell because my code can't read from the Ethernet fast enough. Clearly this is my problem; I must be using a crummy algorithm or something.

The place(s) you work must build stuff in bigger volume than the places I've worked. Selling a couple thousand a year would be great for the places I've worked that sold hardware.

Matt Roberds

Thinking about it, over all the places that I would have known if they did that, none. This may be related to the fact that most (all?) compiler vendors disclaim everything, as John Devereux pointed out.

I knew it was BS when I heard it, but that's the answer I got. From a manager's point of view, it checks the box for "this is a risk, this is how the risk is mitigated" on some project planning document.

Matt Roberds

Here are some choice extracts from a ARM EULA (ARM being the biggest relevant player I would think):

====================================================================== you agree that the software is licensed "as is", and that arm expressly disclaims all representations, warranties, conditions or other terms, express or implied or statutory, including without limitation the implied warranties of non-infringement, satisfactory quality, and fitness for a particular purpose.

you expressly assume all liabilities and risks, for use or operation of software applications, including without limitation, software applications designed or intended for mission critical applications, including, but not limited to, pacemakers, weaponry, aircraft navigation, factory control systems, etc. should the software prove defective, you assume the entire cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.

1. limitation of liability.

to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall arm be liable for any indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages (including loss of profits) arising out of the use or inability to use the software whether based on a claim under contract, tort or other legal theory, even if arm was advised of the possibility of such damages. ======================================================================

No, they're selling it with the boards, OS, and most of the middleware. Of course they're taking most of the profit at the same time.

The point is that the higher-end processors use USB or Ethernet for debug. The "debugger" is built in, there, too. I just don't see expensive debugging hardware anymore, at any level.

At least we're on the same page. ;-)

I've been on both sides, but yes, we're in the 100K - 5M per year range. The PPoE was far smaller (1K was a lot) but even there some manufacturers would give us eval boards, depending on what it was. We got them for TI DSPs, for instance. PICs, too, IIRC.

Seems awfully foolish for management to even let that slide. It makes a lot more sense to use what you really think is better than to lean on a crutch you know you'll never be able to use.

it' like the old saying: ?Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" and later ?Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft"

-Lasse

But was anyone silly enough to think they could sue IBM because the they chose the wrong widget?

Got it.

Some places I worked would get freebie eval boards and/or samples for "smaller" stuff, yeah.

Then there was the very tiny place where the company had to buy the eval boards. They started on the next version of a current product, and the hardware guys tried to order a $100 or so board from Digi-Key. The good folks in Thief River Falls politely declined to accept the order, citing the 180+ days we were out on our other invoices... I quickly got in the habit of checking my account right after the direct deposit of paychecks was supposed to happen. :)

Matt Roberds

On a sunny day (Fri, 8 Nov 2013 06:25:13 +0000 (UTC)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@att.net wrote in :

That does not only happen with small companies. I designed for a city once and ordered some transistors. Same procedure, bills had not been payed for a very long time, order got refused. It turned out our bills were forwarded to the city tax office, who had a special drawer for those.. Bosses made some noise, and some bills were payed for that time..

Yeah, the PPoE was in that situation a few years ago. They had serious cash-flow issues, mainly because the banks froze all credit (during the crunch). They never did miss payroll but they did cut salaries 10% across the board (for a year). I got more than one "pay up deadbeat" call from the suppliers I dealt with. Others gave them some pretty good latitude.

Even big companies sit on bills until the last minute. Sometimes their accounts payable systems aren't as good as they think they are, either. I've had to remind purchasing to pay a few bills at my CPoE (though I have a suspicion that they weren't invoiced properly, either).

On Sat, 02 Nov 2013 11:39:12 -0500, Tim Wescott Gave us:

Power consumption on portable devices is always the big deciding factor. More powerful IF smaller and less dissipative.

Hahahaha... With a DB-9 to RJ-45 converter hanging on it's serial port? hehehe

Yes, but arch (x86 v. ARM) is getting less important than other things. The Quark (in 32nm) is fairly close to ARM in power consumption.

Yes, imagine what they can do with 22nm and stacked CPU/memory die. Intel make-up the x86 handicap with fab process ($$$).

So you're saying they should be fabbing the world's fastest, most efficient ARMs instead?

Tim

They could, but not for their own account. I believe they are already doing that for other customer's IP blocks.

Right. x86 is an ancient architecture that was awful even by 1960's standards.

Intel should! They had an ARM license and gave it up.

Intel's problem is that an ARM license can go for pennies. How are they, used to selling chips for a kilobuck each, going to deal with that?

There is a declining market for superstar CPU chips, too. For "computers." The real market is for thousands of different, specialized asics that just happen to have an ARM core or two tucked into the corner.

They had FPGAs (another example of kilobuck chips), too, and couldn't make a go of it. Their model only works for high margin AND high volume markets. Anything that even dilutes that model that can't be done.

Bingo, but you can't keep Intel's cash machine going with them. Intel will refuse to compete against itself until it disappears (at least as now known).

They bungled i32, Xscale, the 8xxx RISC thing, dram, bubble memory, Itanic, everything but x86.

I bet the internal culture sandbagged the other stuff.