In our previous episode, Wimpie Nortje said: > Marco van de Voort wrote: > > Yes, but from what I remember it was canceled because the amount of > > periphery on the chip is poor. I also looked at ARM, but while there is more > > choice there, it is fragmented over multiple vendors, with multiple > > toolchains (if a free one exists at all) > > > What was canceled? The AVR devices is certainly not and neither are the > GCC toolchains (one for 8b and one for 32b).
Our investigation into AVR. > > PIC32 is only interesting because it is slightly faster and has more mem. > > But that would be more a future proofing thing, since we don't really lack > > it atm. > I don't want to start a AVR/PIC fight because it always ends up in a > religous war and this is the wrong list anyway. However, some of my > reasons for moving from PIC to AVR are: I've found that most of those sentiments are based on old arguments that don't go nowadays. Such discussions could be kept on track ( and interesting) if you simply name numbers. > - AVR is faster, microchip 16-bit maxes at 40 or 50MIPS. Our is 40MIPS. 32-bit goes higher, 80MIPS or so. We keep "speed" mostly in reserve for unexpected problems we have to improvise on . Most of the normal functionality ( a shift register, encoder based) is done by hardware on the chip with no blocking or polling own code, leaving the CPU power (and a lot of normal goodies like pins with special purposes and timers) free for improvising in case of trouble. > - has usually more memory, which programs faster Only if you need it. I typically use 1 - 1.5 kb of the PIC that has 8kb (and there are 16kb editions). PIC32 parts go up to 128kb (ram) iirc. All 16-bit and 32-bit mem is dual ported for DMA purposes. > - has higher code density, No idea. Don't care. The flash of the standard part is 128kb, and I use typically 7k, and haven't been above 11k. We have more flash because the motorcontrol parts are more expensive, and the more expensive parts have more flash. (typical region Eur5/chip) > - has cheaper tools (programmers etc) Microchip programmers start from Eur 20. (note that this particular bit has changed significantly in the last 2 years) > - has free toolchains for all devices Afaik all 16-bit devices are supported by the free toolchains, but have optimization disabled. > The down side is that Microchip has never to my knowledge obsoleted a > device, whereas Atmel quite often do obsolete parts which then requires > recompiling the program for the replacement part. Another important reason was the existance of high pin count (100,144) devices, since we have a lot of binary I/O. _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel