Not that anyone can do anything but guess what might happen, but if Microchip buys Atmel's MPU business, what is the prognosis for the PIC32. I bought some PIC32 tools and invested time learning the family, and now it may go away or new variant design activity may stop. This is because Atmel has a popular ARM based family of MPUs and the MIPS based PIC32 has only been out a year. Freescale sells Coldfire, PowerPC, and ARM based processors, but I am not sure Microchip will take on the same burden. I guess we will all see how it plays out and whether Atmel will accept their offer.
it will probably be AVR32, and it will probably not disappear but rather be divested. my reason for making this speculation: avr32 is an offshoot of the asic division, as I understand it. It exists to support customers who need 32-bit performance but don't want to pay ARM or MIPS royalties.
Right now, PIC, dsPIC, and PIC32 use very different architectures. I'd certainly like to see the 8-bit AVR core replace the PIC core in low-end PICs. For 32-bit I'd prefer ARM32 because its not a Harvard architecture and its also easier to find an Ada compiler for it.
This is a longer term question. Once silicon is fully released, is it rare to pull the plug. Unless it is so niche, that they cannot afford a small run, or so bug ridden, that it is not really released....
What does happen, is the next generation development goes onto the 'back burner', and the device's larger customers are quietly steered onto something else. Then, the price climbs, to the threshold of pain for other customers.... :) All that might take 2-3 years.
I did note that NXP have just released a 125MHz ARM9. Nice looking peripherals.
Atmel also floated an ARM9 FLASH, but quietly said no more, so looks like that needed a respin.
"Dan Ash" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@w39g2000prb.googlegroups.com...
Why stop at PIC32, would it not make sense to divest the PIC12,PIC16,PIC18 and DSPIC as well :-)
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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
No, the AT91 ARM product were developed by the ASIC division, (located in France) as were the peripherals. AVR32 was developed in Norway by the Microcontroller division. Both use peripherals developed by the ASIC division.
Microchip wants to divest the ASIC division. I'll let people judge for themselves if this is smart.
It exists for various reasons. I have seen Atmel stating that it feels that it can sometimes meet customers requirements better if it can optimize the core.
- Better power consumption
- Higher performance
- Better debugging experience.
So why would you want to have two cores which you cannot play around with. One should be enough.
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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
Yes, there was some issues, which should be fixed by now.
You can order AT91SAM9XE-EK kits, At least in early september they were in stock without any significant leadtime. Production volume is coming out before end of the year.
200 MHz ARM926EJ-S with plenty of peripherals. Basically it is a SAM9260 with 128/256/512 kB (128 bit) Flash and 16/32/32 kB SRAM. The core has 16 kB of Instruction Cache and 8 kB of Datacache. Will run the internal bus at 100 MHz and can access SDRAM at 100 MHz.
Think NXP needs to rewrite their ads about fastest ARM flash MCU.
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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
My 2 cents; Wrong subject, should rather be "Fate of AVR32..." If Microchip is the one to lead, there is little chances for the AVR32 to make it to a long life. PIC32 and AVR32 are both rather new and both play in similar leagues. Main difference, MIPS offers a roadmap while with AVR32 everything needs to be developed by lots of engineers. There is a variety of tools available for PIC32 (MIPS) while hardly any tool suppliers are interested to invest in development for AVR32 as long as Atmel provides free tools. So, you are stuck with free tools and free support... Microchip is a company known for making profit. It is one thing to support an 8-bit tool chain for free and it is a completely different ball game to do it for a 32-bit device. Microchip has internal know-how of the PIC32, why would they give it up in favor of an architecture that does not offer any significant benefits over the own device but needs lots of money to be further developed. AVR32 was announced as competitor to ARM7 and ARM9, depending which device. That was before there were CortexM3 and CortexR4, both make the AVR advantages void. They offer similar power, R4 offers more performance, not even talking about ARM11, A8 and whatever comes later. ARM will continue to develop the cores because that is what they do and make their business with. But they develop for many companies and the R&D money is rather well spent as the investment serves many customers. Similar is true for MIPS, nothing like that for AVR32. IF, and that is a big IF, Microchip is successful in taking over Atmel, I would not invest a single cent in further developing anything with an AVR32.
Ulf, your comment about Microchip wanting to sell the ASIC business, you know as well as I do they were not talking about the SAM7 and SAM9 but about the CAP9 and CAP7 and the like. You also know how the microcontroller revenue within Atmel is divided, the largest share going to AVR8 and already the second largest to ARM, not so much less than the AVR business. You also know that the AVR32 business is off the chart or better hardly visible on the chart, so do not imply that the ARM devices might die and AVR32 get further money to do it's own special thing that is doomed either way, whether taken over from Microchip or not.
I wish Microchip luck in their attempt to take over, do some clean up and make good business out of the remaining very good devices.
btw. I am absolutely sure that AVR8 and PIC10,12,14,.... will continue to coexist. Too much money and most of all too much profit in there.
It has a 128 bit flash memory running at 1,8V. The 1.8V operation limits the flash to 17 MHz giving 272 MB/s. If you run the CPU in Thumb Mode, you will be able to top out at 136 native MIPS when not using the cache.
Running in 32 bit ARM mode will give you 68 native MIPS max from flash. When you run from the cache, or from the ITCM you have the full 200 MIPS in 32 bit mode.
Most applications will use a mix so maybe 150-160 MIPS as an average should be OK.
NXP typically uses a 24 MHz flash at 3,3V (power hungry) on their ARM7s. Assuming the same flash technology is used, we get:
24 MHz * 16 bytes = 384 MB/s.
In order to sustain 125 native MIPS, you need 4 * 125 = 500 MB/s. In ARM mode, the part will max run 384/4 = 96 native MIPS. In Thumb mode, the part has bandwidth for 384/2 = 192 MIPS, but obviously it can only do max 125 Thumb MIPS.
The Bus clock is 100 MHz, and all peripherals derive their speed from this clock, so max 50 Mbps on the SPI.
Doubt that, without knowing anything, I would guess the 968 bus would run at 125/2 = 62,5 MHz.
--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
In 1983, I was in Japan, and enjoyed the view from the worlds highest Tokyo Tower :-)
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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
There are advantages of having a proprietary core, as well as there are advantages of having a "std" core. So after any takeover, there will be two "std" cores, MIPS and ARM, and one proprietary core, AVR32.
I see people asking for ARM, I do not see anyone asking for MIPS (actually I now remember one).
Same building, same office, same cores, same peripherals. Even though they are formally two groups, the interaction is so high, that I doubt that there is *any* value in an ASIC division which does not have access to AT91 resources.
That would make several Fortune 500 companies annoyed.
An Schwob
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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
I don't have any good inside info on this but IMHO the pic32 and avr32 will both survive for some time. I see the move as a good one by MCHP and they will be in control in the merged venture. Customers will want both, so PIC32 will have to survive even though it is less mature than AVR32.
With that said, AVR32 might be the main engine that is pushed going forward. Does anyone have data on relative performance of these two processors? I think that this might be the difference if AVR32 is equal and the tools are better. If not, PIC32 has common peripherals which is a big boost for those that migrate.
Renesas manages them all still... and finally convergence after many years.
I have worked quite a bit with PIC 12C509's and PIC12F629's, writing PIC assembly code software for a patented product that has shipped in a few 100k units. So my dislike of low-end PIC "architecture" is based on experience.
I have worked on all : 10, 12, 16 and 18 series PIC micro-controllers and the product line includes: banking solutions, industrial automation, home appliances, automotive etc.
BTW, your experience just with 12 series, says it all.
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