Arm is getting very widely used in most areas of embedded work.
gcc is not up to the mark in many areas of embedded work when compared with the top end commercial compilers.
Yes, I have used gcc and spend years working with Unix as well also much smaller targets. I also know some compiler writers and GCC maintainers. Gcc is not bad but it is not that good either.
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Have you looked at Hyperstone? It looks interesting and I understand that their license fee is considerably lower. Nevertheless, the processor seems to be widely unknown, even to experienced insiders in this business.
I looked at Hyperstone several times but I cannot see a clear benefit over other modern structures like ARM. The greatest problem is that Hyperstone is like the japanese manufacturers. If you know what I mean. If you want to build a camera controller or such thing it's maybe a good choice. For hobbyists oder small firms I think it's better to use common architectures.
Although ARM will be increasingly used in many electronic appliances, there are plenty of applications where much lower-cost processors will suffice, ussually much cheaper ones than 8051 et al.
On the other hand, the price of ARM chips will continue to drop as the technology improves. The Philips ARM chip is around $5 in quantity now. In three years expect it to break $2 with less memory if the market continues to develop. Compare to the price of the Cygnal 8051 chips!
Of course you don't need an ARM to control your microwave. But many 8 bit apps will be done with 32 bit chips in the near future because they can offer more features for the same system price.
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What makes you think that 4 and 8 bit processors aren't going to continue to drop in price as well?
I suppose if dice shrink (and wafer yields rise) to the point where the packaging cost completely dominates the silicon/IP cost, then it won't really matter whether there's a 4/8/16/32 bit processors. When you ask for a price quote, all they have to ask you is "how many pins?"
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Exactly as you say below, at some point the price of the package and testing dominates. There will always be a price advantage with a smaller chip, but if you can add features, even ones unrelated to the product, there will be reason to spend an extra $0.10 cent for the bigger chip. An example of that is the games that come on cell phones. They have nothing to do with using a cell phone, but they make the product sell better and so they are worth a few cents.
Maybe your microwave would work better if it sang to you as it cooked?
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Rick "rickman" Collins
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Initial cost of a tool is not the same as the cost of ownership over time.
You may be working in a company where time is not important, nor the size, speed, efficiency and reliability of the code.
The size of the company has no bearing on the tools you need. I know many one man outfits who use some very expensive tools because they are the right tool that produces fast compact and above all reliable code. As one said to me the other day he does not have time to play about making up for unreliable tools. they need to work correctly without a lot of messing about.
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Sounds good, but there are often features that will be used if the price difference is small enough. The price difference between a 4 bit MCU and an 8 bit MCU is so small that just the convenience of not having to code a 4 bit chip makes it worth it. Likewise a 32 bit chip may only cost $0.10 more than an 8 bit chip at the 45 um node. So I expect there are all sorts of things it can do that don't fit on the 8 bit chip to justify the dime, even if they are silly and not related to the product. The microwave already has a keypad and a readout, I expect there are some creative apps that you can do with that.
If nothing else, in 15 years you may not be able to hire an engineer who can program in assembly since they are all programming in C on 32 bit chips... :)
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Rick "rickman" Collins
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Do you also try to extrapolate the stock market? It is much better to know the causes that create the effects.
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Rick "rickman" Collins
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This is totally meaningless - I'm sure at onetime your graph would have shown that Values were the technology of the future with explosive growth, and flat lines for all bittedness of processors.
Brave move. rickman just said less memory, and did not give the qty column :). Mask ROM devices could easily get sub $2.
DSP devices are doing this already - FLASH for development and medium volumes, and ROM for high volume products, needing stable code in both senses of the term.
$.10 at a million pieces is $100,000. When it comes to large qty, and low resale prices, a dime is a lot of money!
If your designing a greeting card that plays a recorded voice, or a little song when you open the cover, $.10 is a fortune in parts.
If your building a little piece of swag jewelry that blinks a little pattern of LEDs around a company logo, that your going to be giving away at a trade show, $.01 is a lot of money!
Things like keyboard controllers for alarm system pads, power monitoring in power supplies, LCD controllers, remote controls, computer mice, a remote temperature sensor that sends nothing but a temperature back to a main processor, don't need 32 bit processors, and to spend even a penny more on one would be a foolish business decision.
I was once contracting for a company that was working with one of the major remote control manufactures that OEM most of the remotes for cable boxes. They wouldn't blink until you talked about qty's of 1 million and to get their attention, and a decent amount of support you need to be talking in 10's of millions. At $.10 that's $1,000,000. At that kind of savings you can afford to pay someone a years salary to learn to code in assembly language. They used a
6805 variant, with *very* tight assembly language coding using very heavy compression to fit as many codesets as possible into the smallest amount of memory. A penny in production cost could save them $100k on a run of 10mil.
But again to make you're point, sometimes 32 bit is desirable, the company I was contracting with was talking about putting an ARM processor in the remote. They wanted two way communications with a menu built into the remote, the end goal was to allow advertisements to be sent to the remote's display. It was an evil plan...but it paid my mortgage! As a side note, I had the whole thing working in the 6805 8-bit processor, it wasn't until they wanted to add a scripting language and advertising "applets" (and the memory addressing needed for these) that they did a redesign to an ARM. This remote was to be heavily subsidized by advertising money, so cost wasn't as important as it is for the $9 One For All remote you can buy at a drugstore. BTW: They finally did go into production but I have no idea what processor they ended up with:
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they also made uglier, the proto-type I worked on didn't look nearly as goofy. ;-)
Really? So who's writing the "C" compilers that must generate the assembly language code? (And understand it well enough to write decent optimizers?) There will be assembly language programmers in 15 years, for the simple fact a I know a bunch of under 30 year old assembly language programmers now. It seems unlikely they're all going to die in 15 years. ;-)
There's always going to be a need for something to do nothing but count the number of things that has passed it on an assembly line and send that information back to some other CPU. Using Linux, with the ability to play DOOM-7 is always going to be overkill for this...
-Zonn
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