I'm in the process of evaluating a 32bit cpu. The requirements are somewhat conflicting.
-The required tools should be useable after a rather short time, meaning I'm not too keen on debugging some open source tools first
-The tools should have a responsive support, a newsgroup is prefered, and a listserver accepted. Personal email and webbased one-to-one support is considered not fast enough.
-floatingpoint can be hardware or not, best when there is a choice between code compatible devices.
-DSP or microcontroller, is not decided yet
-Flash and RAM in the same chip are preferred.
-An emulator is not required
-Sourcelevel single stepping by JTAG welcome
I'm aware of : Atmel's ARM AD's Blackfin, Sharc, Tigersharc, DSP TI's TMS series Intel's iAPX386 compatible
though except the last haven't any experience in them nor their tools. Oh, I forgot, a few years ago, I had a project with a TI 320C62xx and wasn't impressed at all by the code composer studio.
Did I forget something ? I'll focus on the available tools, as they tend to decide the useablility of a processor and have the most influence on the development time of a project.
Recommendations ?
Rene