On Sep 5, 2008, at 11:14 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

>> Wow.  I had no idea that the Coldfire CPUs had crept so far down in
>> price! That's ... REALLY interesting (IMO) and worth thinking about
>> vs the ARM and MIPS cored "large" MCUs.
>
> The downside is that Coldfire is only from Freescale. But so far the
> only MIPS based real generic MCU is the PIC32 from Microchip.
> ARM is still the king.

I don't know if I consider the single-source issue a big problem when  
you start getting to 32-bit micros.  On the one hand, if you do most  
of your software in C, it ports relatively easily from one core to  
another.  On the other hand, it's not clear that having the same core  
on two microcontrollers with otherwise different peripheral sets/etc  
(as is the case with ARM) is that much of an advantage anyway.

Cisco's IOS, now a HUGE piece of software, went relatively painlessly  
from 68000 to 68020 to 68331 to 680EC30 and 68EC040, to MIPS  
(various), PPC (various), and ARM.  Somewhat more painfully to x86  
(endianness, you know.)  Compiler upgrades are more painful than CPU  
changes...

BillW

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