trend of "ARM"... will this replace all other micro-controll

[Henry]

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.
- Henry


Robert Kaiser schrieb in Nachricht ...

In article <61UAw2ACJok$EwAT@furfur.demon.co.uk>,
Zonk <Zonk@nospam.nospam.nospam.nospam.co.fr> writes:
Interesting thought. However, the one time I looked at ARM, they asked
us for a $1m license fee to use it in a custom IC. Goodbye ARM! Try
Renesas.com , they make the best low power high spec microcontrollers
(H8 and M16); ARM is probably better if you can afford it, but my line
of business would use under 50,000 units a year, so ARM is not cost
effective.

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.

Rob

 

[Dr. O]

"Mylinux" <myLinux@My.com> wrote in message
news:bmtn62$i846@imsp212.netvigator.com...

at the end of the day it will replace of 8051....whenever processor in
industrial controller area; these 80x what what are totally obsolete.


the "arm" will be installed with wireless 805.11g, USB storage, web-based
application to control relay , stepper motor, rocket...etc..


the home-based ( server side) will control the "arm" in remote area ,
remote
"mine sweeper" .... , robotic ....etc.


we need learn to "arm" and gcc in order to survive.

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.

 

[rickman]

"Dr. O" wrote:

"Mylinux" <myLinux@My.com> wrote in message
news:bmtn62$i846@imsp212.netvigator.com...
at the end of the day it will replace of 8051....whenever processor in
industrial controller area; these 80x what what are totally obsolete.


the "arm" will be installed with wireless 805.11g, USB storage, web-based
application to control relay , stepper motor, rocket...etc..


the home-based ( server side) will control the "arm" in remote area ,
remote
"mine sweeper" .... , robotic ....etc.


we need learn to "arm" and gcc in order to survive.

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.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[Grant Edwards]

In article <3F967F31.8B162692@yahoo.com>, rickman wrote:

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!

What makes you think that 4 and 8 bit processors aren't going to continue to
drop in price as well?

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.

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?"

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Where's th' DAFFY
at DUCK EXHIBIT??
visi.com

 

[rickman]

Grant Edwards wrote:

In article <3F967F31.8B162692@yahoo.com>, rickman wrote:

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!

What makes you think that 4 and 8 bit processors aren't going to continue to
drop in price as well?

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?

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.

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?"

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Where's th' DAFFY
at DUCK EXHIBIT??
visi.com

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[Chris Hills]

In article <bn4ql1$fku$2@lust.ihug.co.nz>, Alex Gibson <alxx/*nospam*/@?
../*nospam*/com./remove/au> writes

"Chris Hills" <chris@phaedsys.org> wrote in message news:S4z2N+AamNl$EAMd@phaeds
ys.demon.co.uk...
In article <UhJkb.4203$Uz6.1198@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net>, Ian
McBride <ianmcbride2003@yahoo.com> writes
we need learn to "arm" and gcc in order to survive.

Arm yes... Gcc not entirely true.

I say gcc yes.. arm not entirely true.

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.

Depends if you can afford the commerical compilers.
Or if your boss / company is willing to buy commerical compilers.

Not all of us work for defense or other large companies.
or professional companies...

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.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/\
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org www.phaedsys.org \/\/
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

 

[Chris Hills]

In article <3F967F31.8B162692@yahoo.com>, rickman
<spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> writes

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.

I will bet a years salary you are wrong.

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.

in some cases but not in the majority.


/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/\
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org www.phaedsys.org \/\/
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

 

[Jim Granville]

Chris Hills wrote:

In article <3F967F31.8B162692@yahoo.com>, rickman
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.

I will bet a years salary you are wrong.

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.

-jg

 

[Zonn]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 16:47:30 -0400, in comp.arch.embedded, rickman
<spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> wrote:

Mike Harrison wrote:

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 08:59:29 -0400, rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Dr. O" wrote:

"Mylinux" <myLinux@My.com> wrote in message
news:bmtn62$i846@imsp212.netvigator.com...
at the end of the day it will replace of 8051....whenever processor in
industrial controller area; these 80x what what are totally obsolete.


the "arm" will be installed with wireless 805.11g, USB storage, web-based
application to control relay , stepper motor, rocket...etc..


the home-based ( server side) will control the "arm" in remote area ,
remote
"mine sweeper" .... , robotic ....etc.


we need learn to "arm" and gcc in order to survive.

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.

But many 4/8 bit apps simply don't need more features, so any extra expense cannot be justified.
32 bit chips will never be used for simple apps like microwaves because 8 bit chips will always be
cheaper.

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.

$.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: http://www.guideremote.com
they also made uglier, the proto-type I worked on didn't look nearly as goofy.
;-)

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...

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

--------------------------------------------------------
Zonn Moore
Zektor, LLC
www.zektor.com

Remove the ".AOL" from the email address to reply.

 

[Lewin A.R.W. Edwards]

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

Erm, no, I respectfully think that you have that one bass-ackwards. The
reason there are games on cellphones is because digital phones needed a
fairly frisky CPU and plenty of memory for DSPizing and realtime data
processing, crypto, etc and someone realized that this hardware could be
used for an occasional frivol, being totally unused while there is no call
in progress.

With the modern genre of phones, this has come one step further because
marketing has looked at the possibility of selling downloadable software
with a view to someday making cellular service providers turn a profit. But
the feature was initially a side-effect. I even recall interviews with Nokia
engineers who said as much.

Having worked in electronic toys and consumer appliances for most of my
recent career, I can say categorically that $0.10 per chip is often money
wasted, and practically always money marketing will NOT permit you to spend,
unless it is for a feature that is specifically required to implement some
bullet point off the product roadmap. For low-volume projects, other factors
dominate, of course.

 

[rickman]

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" wrote:

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

Erm, no, I respectfully think that you have that one bass-ackwards. The
reason there are games on cellphones is because digital phones needed a
fairly frisky CPU and plenty of memory for DSPizing and realtime data
processing, crypto, etc and someone realized that this hardware could be
used for an occasional frivol, being totally unused while there is no call
in progress.

With the modern genre of phones, this has come one step further because
marketing has looked at the possibility of selling downloadable software
with a view to someday making cellular service providers turn a profit. But
the feature was initially a side-effect. I even recall interviews with Nokia
engineers who said as much.

Having worked in electronic toys and consumer appliances for most of my
recent career, I can say categorically that $0.10 per chip is often money
wasted, and practically always money marketing will NOT permit you to spend,
unless it is for a feature that is specifically required to implement some
bullet point off the product roadmap. For low-volume projects, other factors
dominate, of course.

I don't think you understand my point. I am not talking about some
frill that an engineer wants to add. I am saying that marketing always
wants to put more into a product. If the incremental cost is very low,
then those "frills" will start to be added.

Of course no one will use a 32 bit processor in a greeting card as you
see them today. But when the cost is low enough to allow, you will see
32 bit processors in even disposable things like digital ink
newspapers.

The issue in the cell phone is that the game takes up code storage
space. That is an added cost unless you say "there is spare space".
But at some point of cell phone development that game pushed the size of
the flash up to the next notch or required another round of code
reduction to make it all fit. Nothing is free, but often the cost is
low enough.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[rickman]

Jim Granville wrote:

Chris Hills wrote:

In article <3F967F31.8B162692@yahoo.com>, rickman
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.

I will bet a years salary you are wrong.

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.

Especially since he doesn't know what I make a year...

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[Wumpus]

Hi,

What's wrong with GCC?

It is absolutely everything but unreliable, the chance that bugs are
found and eradicated is very high, because it is used much more than
most commericial compilers (possibly except MS stuff, but I wouldn't
call that better)

Another advantage of GCC is that it is portable between architectures,
if you decide to switch to another processor or playform you can still
use gcc.
You'd have to buy and port all your code when using a CPU or platform
dependent commercial compiler.

I can't think of any disadvantages of GCC except it is quite difficult
to set up. Once setup it works like a charm though..

Wumpus

 

[Lewin A.R.W. Edwards]

I don't think you understand my point. I am not talking about some
frill that an engineer wants to add. I am saying that marketing always
wants to put more into a product. If the incremental cost is very low,

No, I don't think you understand MY point The marketroids - let's take
toys for instance - have a range of trucks, say, nd they want to add one
more product to that range. They come to the design people, who make a huge
list of possible features. The engineers implement a prototype with some
subset - perhaps a large subset - of those features. The marketing people
then say "Great! Now make it for $x, and take out whatever features are
required to achieve that!". This is not theory, it's bitter experience of
how the mass-market consumer electronics industry works (except for very
small companies). You simply cannot persuade marketing people to throw in
extra features after the fact unless they are /literally/ free.

$0.10, by the way, is a massive cost factor in an electronic toy. I have
spent upwards of two weeks trying to find a way to use two $0.0025 resistors
instead of one $0.05 capacitor (in a toy with SRP $12.95), the end effect of
which was to cut out the entire feature that required this capacitor, rather
than spend $0.05. I can project from this that in a $79.95 microwave oven, a
$0.10 BOM increase is still very significant, and days will cheerfully be
spent to shave it out.

--
-- Lewin A.R.W. Edwards (http://www.zws.com/)
Learn how to develop high-end embedded systems on a tight budget!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0750676094/zws-20

 

[Zonn]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 13:21:23 -0400, in msg <3F980E13.8EC6ABEE@yahoo.com>,
rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" wrote:

Having worked in electronic toys and consumer appliances for most of my
recent career, I can say categorically that $0.10 per chip is often money
wasted, and practically always money marketing will NOT permit you to spend,
unless it is for a feature that is specifically required to implement some
bullet point off the product roadmap. For low-volume projects, other factors
dominate, of course.

I don't think you understand my point. I am not talking about some
frill that an engineer wants to add. I am saying that marketing always
wants to put more into a product. If the incremental cost is very low,
then those "frills" will start to be added.

Of course no one will use a 32 bit processor in a greeting card as you
see them today. But when the cost is low enough to allow, you will see
32 bit processors in even disposable things like digital ink
newspapers.

It's all about profit in high volume stuff (toys, greeting cards, etc), when 32
bit processors are the same price or cheaper, and are the same size or smaller,
and use the same power or less, than 8 bit processors, then 8 bit processors
will go away. Otherwise there will be niches that 8 bit processors will fill
over 32 bits. (As there are still niches being filled by 4 bit processors,
though I'm sure they are becoming more and more scarce.)

One thing I can think of that has worked this way is memory. Because of
mass-production, it's cheaper to use a 32k RAM part than a 2k RAM part, assuming
you can even find a 2k part (or even 32k for that matter!).

It could be processors will go the way of memory in price, but unless they can
build 32 bits smaller, and have them use less power than 8 bits, there will
probably be applications where spending *more* money for an 8 bit processor
would be a requirement.

NASA, for instance, would probably place more emphasis on its current
consumption budget over a processor's ability to play Tetris using its spare
computational power. So even pricing won't necessarily kill the 8 bit processor.

-Zonn
--------------------------------------------------------
Zonn Moore
Zektor, LLC
www.zektor.com

Remove the ".AOL" from the email address to reply.

 

[Pete Fenelon]

In comp.arch.embedded Wumpus <wumpus@!removethis!goliath.darktech.org> wrote:

Hi,

What's wrong with GCC?

Very little, however it is not the be-all-and-end-all.

It's rarely the best compiler for smaller micros. In my experience,
on anything with (roughly) less than about four general-purpose
registers capable of holding addresses or natural-sized integers,
you're better off with a compiler that's been crafted with the
constraints of the architecture in mind - there's too much juggling
otherwise for it to be time- and space-efficient. (e.g. the gcc ports
for HC11/HC12).

It's also rarely the best compiler for very powerful micros - for
example, Intel's own compiler eats it alive on high-end x86, in my
experience, since Intel can afford to put a lot of chip-specific
peephole optimisations into their own toolchain. (And do a hell of
a lot of expensive dataflow analysis).

GCC is quick to port, generates tolerable code on most common 32-bit
architectures, and comes with a lot of useful tools. It's capable of
keeping most 32-bit RISCS fed and watered quite nicely.

It is absolutely everything but unreliable, the chance that bugs are
found and eradicated is very high, because it is used much more than
most commericial compilers (possibly except MS stuff, but I wouldn't
call that better)

Bugs in the core of GCC will be hunted down and slain quickly. Bugs in
ports - whether ports to a new host system or back-ends for a new
processor - might linger for some time.

I can't think of any disadvantages of GCC except it is quite difficult
to set up. Once setup it works like a charm though..

See above. For most platforms it's a good solution. For some it isn't.
For others it's good but there are better ones...

One size never fits all, at least not perfectly.

pete
--
pete@fenelon.com "there's no room for enigmas in built-up areas" HMHB

 

[rickman]

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" wrote:

I don't think you understand my point. I am not talking about some
frill that an engineer wants to add. I am saying that marketing always
wants to put more into a product. If the incremental cost is very low,

No, I don't think you understand MY point The marketroids - let's take
toys for instance - have a range of trucks, say, nd they want to add one
more product to that range. They come to the design people, who make a huge
list of possible features. The engineers implement a prototype with some
subset - perhaps a large subset - of those features. The marketing people
then say "Great! Now make it for $x, and take out whatever features are
required to achieve that!". This is not theory, it's bitter experience of
how the mass-market consumer electronics industry works (except for very
small companies). You simply cannot persuade marketing people to throw in
extra features after the fact unless they are /literally/ free.

$0.10, by the way, is a massive cost factor in an electronic toy. I have
spent upwards of two weeks trying to find a way to use two $0.0025 resistors
instead of one $0.05 capacitor (in a toy with SRP $12.95), the end effect of
which was to cut out the entire feature that required this capacitor, rather
than spend $0.05. I can project from this that in a $79.95 microwave oven, a
$0.10 BOM increase is still very significant, and days will cheerfully be
spent to shave it out.

I understand. But an $80 microwave is not a $13 toy. The toy is
planned with a well defined set of features that fit the price window.
A microwave will have more flexibility to *plan in* features if the cost
is not significant. How many microwaves do you find that *don't* have a
menu of standard foods or other features that could be left out and
still not impact the basic funtion of a microwave? The cheapest one I
see in Walmart still has those features. I expect the couple of extra
pads on the keypad alone increase the cost by $0.10.

But enough. There will always be products that do not have *any* use
for a 32 processor no matter how small the incremental cost. Just as we
still have 4 bit apps now when the cost difference is very slight. But
clearly the trend will change as the cost of the 32 bit parts comes
down. I expect the 8 bit parts will only dominate for a few more
years.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[Zonn]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 23:39:26 -0400, in msg <3F989EEE.7256ADCA@yahoo.com>,
rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> wrote:

There will always be products that do not have *any* use
for a 32 processor no matter how small the incremental cost. Just as we
still have 4 bit apps now when the cost difference is very slight. But
clearly the trend will change as the cost of the 32 bit parts comes
down. I expect the 8 bit parts will only dominate for a few more
years.

32 bit processors, as used today, usually need quite a few support processors.

An intel based PC for example:

Base processor: A 32 bit (64 bit?) 80x86 derivative.

Support processors (of unknown bitsize)

Keyboard controller inside motherboard (usually hidden in a chipset now days).
Keyboard controller inside keyboard.
Monitor control (OSD, autosync, etc)
Modem
Display card (possibly more powerful than the base processor in many ways)
Hard disk.
CD rom.
Printer.
Newer speaker systems with digital volume controls and USB support.
Mouse
Network routers, switches, hubs, etc.
Now days stupid stuff like fan controllers w/digital temperature readout...

Counting the main processor used to write this post, I just counted 24 working
CPUs on my desktop. (Includes a couple of HP calculators, 3 remote controls, a
wireless desk phone (1 CPU in the handset, 1 in the base), etc, etc...

It's incredible the number of places you find CPU's now days! Someone of 20
years ago might have made the argument: CPU's will never be as cheap as discrete
logic, they'll always draw more current, and be more expensive. And they would
have been wrong, so I know where you're going with this!

It's not hard to see why currently, small processors, outsell the larger ones by
a good margin, at least qty wise (according to the Mouser distributor at my last
job), I'm sure the gap is smaller dollar wise.

But then using the "discrete" .vs. "CPU" analogy you can predict that processors
are going to get more and more powerful for the same price/performance ratio,
and part of this is going to be an increase in the internal data path and
register size.

Someday the cheapest, most energy efficient way to blink an LED, just may be
with a 32 bit processor and a battery. And hopefully google will have archived
your original post so you can say "I told you so!". ;-)

-Zonn

--------------------------------------------------------
Zonn Moore
Zektor, LLC
www.zektor.com

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