Comments on: The consultant's dilemma

By: Nigel Jones

Nigel Jones — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:05:41 +0000

I have worked on one high volume (> 100000) project involving AVR's- not that it proves anything. My recollection from the last industry survey I saw is that Atmel is number 2 in 8-bit micros, albeit a long way behind leader Microchip. Atmel has suffered from turmoil at the top of the company as investors have asked "how come your products are so good – but your sales don't reflect this?". I think it's a great question. We have had some brief discussions before on this blog where the merits of PIC and AVR were discussed. It seems to me that Microchip has done a great job of marketing to those in college, and then this momentum (inertia) has carried through to the market place.My assessment is that engineers are far more objective and logical than the general population. Despite this, when I see the enormous popularity of the 8 bit PICs I get a bit depressed about what it says about even engineer's objectivity.Despite all this, maybe Kyle's comment above will make the whole discussion moot, as it's highly likely we'll all be programming ARM processors for every application in the near future.

By: Kepa Diez

Kepa Diez — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:25:10 +0000

I started developing for embedded systems with (the very limiting, and not so compiler-friendly) 8 bit PIC microcontrollers, and since then I have always wanted to try the 8 bit ATMEL MCU family, but haven't had the chance yet.But it is a bit strange, being such an interesting family from the technical point of view, that there seems to be very little presence in the mass production industry (>100.000 units manufactured). Maybe the price in large quantities is not as compatitive as the good old 8051s, or even newer Freescale/NEC/Microchip/Renesas MCUs?Is there any other reason that I miss, which makes them less suitable for mass production?

By: Nigel Jones

Nigel Jones — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:11:35 +0000

To Kyle's point – yes the price performance ratio of Cortex processors from Luminary, NXP & ST (to name a few) is quite astonishing. Indeed I can see this leading to the whole sale death of many architecture lines. Thanks for keeping me straight on this Kyle (as always)!To answer Nathan's question, my favourite 8 bit architecture is by far the AVR from Atmel. There isn't a lot to to chose from in the 16 bit realm and so by default I seem to use the MSP430. The Hitachi SH range looks interesting – but I've never used it (so if you one day you retain me and find that I'm recommending the SH range then be suspicious ). I know a lot of folks like the Microchip PIC24 series as well.In the 32 bit arena, ARM is king from a market share perspective. However I can't say that I'm particularly enamored with it. I was really heartened to see that Microchip went with the MIPS architecture in its recent PIC32 announcement. I'm also intrigued by Atmel's new AVR32 offerings.At the high 32 / 64 bit end I much prefer the PowerPC architecture over the X86.

By: NAthan B.

NAthan B. — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:00:33 +0000

Which is your favourite 8 bit (say, 4-32 KB ROM) architecture?

By: Kyle Bostian

Kyle Bostian — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:23:04 +0000

Regarding your quote: "an ARM processor is used when an HC08 would have done quite nicely…" I think your point comes across very clearly, but you may be surprised if you compare these two Digi-Key part numbers: MC908AP64CFBE-ND and 726-1021-ND.