For some reason I found myself reading these newsgroups which I haven't really used for many years. It seems that although the Parallax Propeller web forums are extremely active there never seems to be much discussion elsewhere. Aren't you all curious as to what you are missing out on?
I have used just about every kind of micro and architecture over the decades and while I might still use some small "one buck" micros for certain tasks and some special ARM chips for higher end tasks I have almost exclusively been using Propeller chips for everything else. The reason is very simple, they are so simple to work with and there are no "peripheral modules" to worry about other than the counters and video hardware per cog. Every pin is general-purpose and any one of the eight
32-bit cores can use them, you don't have to worry about trying to route a special pin or have the dilemma of using the special pin for one function but not the other etc. The 32-bit CPUs or cogs are a breeze to program and you can work with a variety of languages besides the easy to use Spin compiler that comes with it.For you Forth enthusiasts there has been a big flurry of Forth related threads on the Propeller forums of late and there are several versions of Forth including my own Tachyon Forth. IMHO this is the best way to get into the Propeller and it's hardware. I just can't be bother trying to cram functions and debug interrupts on other chips when I can set a cog to work on a task and still have plenty of resources left over including video on-chip.
If you are intrigued or just plain curious it won't kill you unless you are a cat to have a look at my introduction page which has links to projects and the forum etc.
There is the sup'ed up version of the Propeller, the Propeller II coming out in the following months which has 96 I/O, 8 cogs, 128K RAM and
160MIPS/core.BTW, I use Silabs C8051F chips as specialised peripherals (ADC etc) that hang off the "I2C bus" from the Propeller and I can load new firmware into each chip using just one extra line to program them in-circuit.
*peter*