Cheap x86 MCU/SOC chips?

Like anyone without a purchasing department, I'm having a royally tough time getting pricing out of vendors for x86 chips. I'm really interested in sample pricing for the following:

Geode 1200 Intel486 Intel386

80c186 SiS 550 Elan520

And possibly any other chip than can do DOS/WindowsCE/Win3.11.

Can anyone point me to a directory/repository to get pricing on these, or a good vendor who carries most of them and show the pricing online? If theres a central yellowpages type directory, even for pay, for vendors and their pricing of such chips, I'd be really interested.

Reply to
Ghazan Haider
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This is a bit of a schizophrenic question covering a huge performance spread; is this for a single project? The 186 can't do Windows CE or Windows 3.11 (the last version of Windows to support real mode was

3.0). Windows CE doesn't support the i386. RDC makes a 33MHz clone of the 80C186, see jkmicro.com for boards that use it.

As a data point, SC1200 was ~$40 for high volume applications. GX1 by itself was $25 in volume a year ago. The associated mandatory CS5530 companion IC added $15 to the cost, though. If you want the ability to run any of those OSes you speced, then Geode and i486 are really the only choices, because the SiS part is _really_ mavericky and oddball (I think also expensive - because SBCs based on this part are ferociously expensive). The Elan is really a bad choice for a new design because AMD has been really evil about their x86 orphan policy, and Geode is their x86 embedded future now.

You might be best off to consult one of the surplus vendors, usbid.com, partminer.com, etc.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

Thanks for the reply it helped.

It would seem that the x86 SOC market is big enough, with the huge binary base. National sold theirs, AMD has been drowning the Elan, would be wonderful if they can guarantee the life of at least one Elan. Do you have a rough idea of their bulk costs? I saw around $20 somewhere, which cant be bad for a slow chip.

These are for planning a collection of projects, some need low-power so I'll look at Transmeta too, but the Elan or Geode would have been cool. the 186 is for a much smaller and low volume project, a PC104 project with DOS applications, but price is the sticking point.

Arent there ANY other x86 SOCs or MCUs in the world? I heard China was producing some but that was a while ago...

Reply to
Ghazan Haider

This "huge binary base" is by and large a huge base of code for enormous bloated operating systems like Windows and desktop Linux though. Precious few embedded applications running on x86, compared to its competitors. I don't really count Internet kiosks and print-your-own-photos booths as being real embedded applications.

I don't remember. We did look into this a few years ago, it's been too long.

Damn, if 186 performance is good enough, you can emulate the 186 and DOS entirely in software on an XScale much faster than the 186, and still get your price point down, plus a boatload of free peripherals into the bargain.

x86 isn't terribly popular for embedded applications, especially at the higher performance levels. Any particular reason for being wedded to x86? The field is much richer if you move to ARM, MIPS, PowerPC...

- and the parts are better - easier to program, tiny power dissipation, physically small, ...

Of course, there is ST's STmicro series, which although not exactly popular, is at least in production. Last time I checked this was a couple of years ago, but the prices were in the $30-$35 range for the midrange parts.

Via makes x86 processors that they call "embedded" (Eden, C3) but really this is more a marketing spin on the size of Via's smaller PC motherboards. But if you are looking at Transmeta then you're already willing to consider non-"true SOC" devices.

There's the ZFlinux chip, which you may or may not still be able to buy, but which would be silly to choose :)

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

That does make me wonder whats the highest MIPS-per-$$ SOC, I suspect the ARM7.

Yes. There are tonnes of older DOS-based games out there with cheaper licenses since noone is buying them anymore. x86 will also appeal much more to 'hacker' types who can install linux and boast to friends.... marketing!

I guess I'm not comfortable with the binary base for other architectures, except I can run Linux/NetBSD/QNX and compile free apps. For those I'd have to develop the software too, more $$$. For x86, you can get a few smart highschoolers in summer, at least to install and test the software.

I did see this and have been very interested in the STPC chips. I'm keeping a close eye.

Well, maybe a CPU with a single chipset, should increase my choices a bit. The problem is both the cost of two chips and the footprint; but if its below $20, it fixes some of the projects.

In low volumes, I could lay my hands on older stocks of even Elan486 and the likes, so out-of-production chips are not too much of an issue, if say 2000 pieces can be had.

Thanks for mentioning the names, I'm off to get pricing. I hate hunting for pricing.

Reply to
Ghazan Haider
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consider ARM7 or MIPS, I used Realtec SoC latelly. They all run Linux, so the HUGE (and I mean HUUUGE, not that silly x86) software base is not a problem. Realtec SoC comes as a total sollution with case, wifi, serial, 2x rj45 and power supply for 100$.

ancient

bloat

crap

look Asia, Taiwan/China.

Pozdrawiam.

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Reply to
RusH

I am considering ARM for other designs. The x86 requirement is for running older DOS games. Emulating x86 in ARM takes more than simply an ARM.

Even if you do work for realtec, it still sounds great. I think I'll get one for testing and development for other stuff. I'll continue the struggle for cheap x86...

Has an interesting binary base though. Try running DOOM, Heretic, civilization, monkey island on any other cpu. Source code not available.

WindowsCE does sell however. Put a microsoft stamp, make it sound like it works with windows xp and people will pay. I prefer Linux on my PDA but 90% of the people I know prefer something that will look like windows and work with it.

OK, I'll look for a directory of their manufacturers. Thanks.

Reply to
Ghazan Haider

AFAIK Asian Sources is the definitive directory/reference.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

Dos games ? hmmm dos games are obsolete, the fun one are ported to linux anyway :)

I wish I would.

minitar

formatting link
actually they go for as low as 60$ in USA

80MHz afair 2MB flash, 16MB ram

I'm considering something bigger for the next project/hack, like Asus WL500 b/g : 200MHz Mips, 32/64MB ram, USB, LPT, and if you remove the wlan module you get a miniPCI - ideal for a graphic adapter.

will run on 80MHz arm

will run too

too

Pozdrawiam.

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Reply to
RusH

When Windows NT4 supported the DEC Alpha processor, there was a program called FX32! that enabled 32 bit Windows PE x86 executables to be executed on the Alpha platform. The x86 was translated on the fly to the native Alpha instruction set and stored on disk far later use. The only thing the user observed was a slower execution the first time some (untranslated) execution paths were executed.

Transmeta processors translate the x86 instructions to an internal form and stores it into a RAM segment allocated from the main RAM and after this executes the translated instructions from RAM.

Does the ARM7 or MIPS environments have this kind of support ?

If not, these hardware platforms are hardly worth considering for those who need x86 support.

How many of these (Unix) programs are available in binary format for ARM7 and MIPS running, say some version of Linux ? If binary versions are not available, how many can be installed by downloading the source distribution and running "make" without touching the makefile or the actual source file to fit it for the specific platform ? If this is not possible, the program is unsuitable for a typical end user to use, unless there is a trained support organisation.

Still some software is only available on a specific platform and the quality of emulators is not sufficient in many cases.

Even if the sources for some 16 bit real mode x86 programs would be available, porting these messy programs requires a lot of work, if you have to do itself :-). The situation gets even more complicated if the person who wants to use a specific program does not have a programming background.

Paul

Reply to
Paul Keinanen

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