(OT) What? MORE 8-Bit Microcontrollers?

[Paul Rubin]

FYI: https://www.eejournal.com/article/what-more-8-bit-microcontrollers/

Says:

* Microchip is by far the biggest 8-bit MCU mfgr, with 32% market share.
NXP is second, with 11%. I'm surprised. In unit volume I'd expect
no-name Chinese MCU's to be way ahead of both. Maybe not in dollar
volume. Microchip now makes the AVR and PIC lines fwiw.

* Microchip has its own fabs and is building more

* "as weird as it may sound, a lot of 8-bit growth is being driven by
32-bit growth where the 32-bit processors are passing off things like
human machine interface (HMI) functions and housekeeping tasks to the
8-bit processors."

* Microchip introducing 5 new families with 65 new parts in 2022. Four
new PIC families and one new AVR family. Main interesting new feature
seems to be programmable analog stuff on the chips, such as programmable
gain amplifiers replacing external op amps. Also "core independent
peripherals" which sound sort of like the PIO state machines in the
RP2040.

* Other stuff too but I think the above are the main points. Generally
an interesting article including from a Forth perspective. It will be
nice to have Forth support for these new parts and features.

[Zbig]

I stumbled recently upon rather interesting MCU, with interesting
capabilities and Forth-friendly autoincrement addressing mode
available -- I mean Intel 80296SA:
( http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Intel/MCS96/MANUALS/27280301.PDF )
and... it turned out that it's "phased out". :(

[dxforth]

On 2/07/2022 09:18, Paul Rubin wrote:
> FYI: https://www.eejournal.com/article/what-more-8-bit-microcontrollers/
>
> Says:
>
> * Microchip is by far the biggest 8-bit MCU mfgr, with 32% market share.
> NXP is second, with 11%. I'm surprised. In unit volume I'd expect
> no-name Chinese MCU's to be way ahead of both. Maybe not in dollar
> volume.

Who buys Chinese MCU's? So willing are customers to stick with brand-name,
there's been plenty of fakes coming from you know where.

[Paul Rubin]

dxforth <dxf...@gmail.com> writes:
> Who buys Chinese MCU's?

Chinese manufacturers, who make an awful lot of products. See also this:

https://jaycarlson.net/2019/09/06/whats-up-with-these-3-cent-microcontrollers/

> So willing are customers to stick with brand-name,

AFAIK there are no brand name 3 cent MCU's.

[Paul Rubin]

Zbig <zbigni...@gmail.com> writes:
> I stumbled recently upon rather interesting MCU, with interesting
> capabilities and Forth-friendly autoincrement addressing mode
> available -- I mean Intel 80296SA:

I wasn't familiar with this but it appears to be a fairly high end 16
bit CPU with DSP-like functions including a 40 bit accumulator
(presumably for 16*16 MAC). So it's way outside the 8 bit MCU class.

The MSP430 is still around, though fading. It also has those addressing
modes and is very Forth friendly. There are some nice Forths for it,
and the product line has some unique hardware features, like FRAM on the
chip and low voltage operation so you can use a single 1.5 volt battery.

It is mostly displaced by ARM now though,d, I think.

[dxforth]

Nor gain going to a 3 cent MCU when the rest of the product costs far
more, or there's a question of quality, reliability, supply etc.
Chinese manufacturers will say you got what you paid for.

[Rick C]

You must have dug pretty hard to find that device. I think it was obsolete some 20 years ago. Intel came out with two alternative CPU families to the 80x86 line. Both were interesting, one was very interesting (I don't recall the designation) but they simply could not compete with the 80x86 market momentum. I think a project I worked on (DoD stuff) picked a COTS board with the "very" interesting chip on it. They wanted to get away from custom designs, but the irony is, the products change too fast to buy truly commercial products, so the ended up with designs intended for the military market, which were designed using government money, but would become obsolete when the chips were no longer available.

The real problem with DoD using electronics is the rapid pace of obsolescence in the commercial chips compared to the long operational lifespan of typical DoD hardware because of the extensive qualification process. Commercial gear is fine if it only has a 5 year lifetime. 10 years is a very long time in the commercial sector. Products are completely obsolete in that time frame.

--

Rick C.

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[Zbig]

> You must have dug pretty hard to find that device.

Not really. I was searching for something else -- and stumbled upon this. Looks for a quite
nice chip to me, and from what I see a few Chinese suppliers still offer "old stock" on eBay.

[Rick C]

Ok, but what use is a few pieces of old stock? If you want to build a one off of something, why not craft your own CPU in an FPGA. It will run faster and you can actually share the design with others.

Well, not that there is any shortage of softcore CPU designs.

--

Rick C.

+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

[Zbig]

> > > You must have dug pretty hard to find that device.
> > Not really. I was searching for something else -- and stumbled upon this. Looks for a quite
> > nice chip to me, and from what I see a few Chinese suppliers still offer "old stock" on eBay.
> Ok, but what use is a few pieces of old stock? If you want to build a one off of something, why not craft your own CPU in an FPGA. It will run faster and you can actually share the design with others.

The same use as it was still manufactured: some practice and some fun. I don't mean anything
for production/business, just I noticed that having interesting capabilities it could be a "heart"
of another SBC and with its addressing modes it can be better host for a Forth system than, say,
6502 in my old C-64.
-- it's 16 bit
-- it's quite fast (40 or 50 MHz)
-- it can use up to 1 MB of external RAM
-- it's von Neumann
-- it has quite rich instruction set

Still Paul is right, higher-end MSP430s are interesting for this as well.

[Rick C]

Von Neumann? I think there aren't many that aren't von Neumann. I suppose you are referring to those with a separate program and data address space?

To each, their own, but this is actually a very obsolete machine. The 40 or 50 MHz speed is slow by today's MCUs. I don't know the max speed of the MSP430s, but there are $2 ARM chips, or you can get ARMs will large on chip memory. If you want external RAM for some reason, there are those as well. An rPi has some GBs of RAM for $15, I believe.

I can't think of any reason to use a CPU designed and built in the 90s.

Perhaps you are not aware that this chip will use significant power and occupy significant board space. You should check out the ARM product families, the many, many ARM product families. They will run rings around a '196 device in virtually every aspect.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
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[Paul Rubin]

Rick C <gnuarm.del...@gmail.com> writes:
> Von Neumann? I think there aren't many that aren't von Neumann. I
> suppose you are referring to those with a separate program and data
> address space?

I think that is called Harvard architecture. Von Neumann architecture
sometimes refers to code and data being in the same space, so among
other things you can write self-modifying code.

> An rPi has some GBs of RAM for $15, I believe.

The $15 but currently unobtainium Pi Zero 2 has 512MB of ram, I believe.
But I wouldn't call it an MCU. It's more like a tiny PC or server
motherboard. There are bigger, more expensive Raspberry Pi's with more
memory and they are also currently unobtainium. The one you can
actually get starts at $70 and is built into a keyboard-like enclosure.
It has 4GB.

> I can't think of any reason to use a CPU designed and built in the 90s.

I'd consider it to be retrocomputing by now, but some people are into that.

[Rick C]

On Sunday, July 3, 2022 at 6:08:51 PM UTC-4, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Rick C <gnuarm.del...@gmail.com> writes:
> > Von Neumann? I think there aren't many that aren't von Neumann. I
> > suppose you are referring to those with a separate program and data
> > address space?
> I think that is called Harvard architecture. Von Neumann architecture
> sometimes refers to code and data being in the same space, so among
> other things you can write self-modifying code.

Harvard architecture is completely separated code and data spaces. This typically is only found in DSP devices and a few low end MCUs.

> > An rPi has some GBs of RAM for $15, I believe.
> The $15 but currently unobtainium Pi Zero 2 has 512MB of ram, I believe.
> But I wouldn't call it an MCU. It's more like a tiny PC or server
> motherboard.

Whatever.

> There are bigger, more expensive Raspberry Pi's with more
> memory and they are also currently unobtainium. The one you can
> actually get starts at $70 and is built into a keyboard-like enclosure.
> It has 4GB.

Maybe I need to sell off my rPi units and get rich?

> > I can't think of any reason to use a CPU designed and built in the 90s.
> I'd consider it to be retrocomputing by now, but some people are into that.

Whatever.

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

[Anton Ertl]

Paul Rubin <no.e...@nospam.invalid> writes:
>> An rPi has some GBs of RAM for $15, I believe.
>
>The $15 but currently unobtainium Pi Zero 2 has 512MB of ram, I believe.
>But I wouldn't call it an MCU. It's more like a tiny PC or server
>motherboard. There are bigger, more expensive Raspberry Pi's with more
>memory and they are also currently unobtainium.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Modell B, 4GB RAM is in stock at several dealers
according to
<https://geizhals.at/raspberry-pi-4-modell-b-a2081132.html>, but the
cheapest one asks EUR 159 for it, about twice as much as in earlier
times.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
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[Paul Rubin]

an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
> Raspberry Pi 4 Modell B, 4GB RAM ...the cheapest one asks EUR 159 for

> it, about twice as much as in earlier times.

More like 3x, I think. They are cashing in on the scarcity. How much
do they ask for the model 400, computer only? That is basically the
same as the 4B with 4GB, but it has a different form factor and is
installed inside a keyboard. It is available (by "available" I mean you
actually can buy them) for about 70 USD here. While you can only get
model 4's by paying a lot for them, such as on ebay. Rick's plan for
getting rich from his model 4 collection might actually work, depending
on how many he has.

[Jurgen Pitaske]

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-400?variant=32280738070611
available