3 ms·

The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed. Lighting an LED

by VLM 11y ago

The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed. Lighting an LED takes 100x the power of running a 10F series at full speed. I can buy some 10F series PICs cheaper than a 555 timer chip, which is pretty amazing.

zokier 11y ago
> The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed I don't really believe either of those claims. At 1ku quantity on Digikey (which admittedly is not the cheapest vendor) cheapest Cortex-M0 chips cost $0.378 and low-power chips (NXP KL03) start from $0.504. That aforementioned KL03 is advertised to run at 50 µA/MHz. Meanwhile cheapest PIC costs $0.35 and is rated 175µA at 4 MHz, which equals to 43.75 µA/MHz. Of course the power consumption figures are not directly comparable, and something like µA/MIPS might be better metric anyways. But based on this there is no way PIC is anywhere near fifty times more power efficient or ten times cheaper.
- emeraldd 11y ago
  Several of the PIC models have a low power mode where they run off an internal RC circuit somewhere in the KHz range. Just enough to wake up on an interrupt or some external stimuli and really pushes their power usage way down. For a PIC10KF320/322 you're looking at: Sleep: 20nA, 1.8V Operating: 25uA @ 1Mhz, 1.8V Watchdog Timer: 500nA, 1.8V Of course that's dependent on what' you're doing with the io pins etc. See:http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/40001585D.pdf http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/40001585D.pd... edit: fix typo
  - makomk 11y ago
    For comparison, TI's MSP432 series is specified at 90 uA/MHz running, 850nA sleep with RTC enabled - and that's a Cortex M4 part with hardware FPU, not even an M0. I think Atmel's newest low-power M0 parts are even more impressive. Plus the Internet of Things means companies are wanting to run increasingly demanding code on low-power embedded devices. 8-bit chips are getting squeezed hard by ARM.

by VLM 11y ago

zokier 11y ago

> The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed I don't really believe either of those claims. At 1ku quantity on Digikey (which admittedly is not the cheapest vendor) cheapest Cortex-M0 chips cost $0.378 and low-power chips (NXP KL03) start from $0.504. That aforementioned KL03 is advertised to run at 50 µA/MHz. Meanwhile cheapest PIC costs $0.35 and is rated 175µA at 4 MHz, which equals to 43.75 µA/MHz. Of course the power consumption figures are not directly comparable, and something like µA/MIPS might be better metric anyways. But based on this there is no way PIC is anywhere near fifty times more power efficient or ten times cheaper.

emeraldd 11y ago
Several of the PIC models have a low power mode where they run off an internal RC circuit somewhere in the KHz range. Just enough to wake up on an interrupt or some external stimuli and really pushes their power usage way down. For a PIC10KF320/322 you're looking at: Sleep: 20nA, 1.8V Operating: 25uA @ 1Mhz, 1.8V Watchdog Timer: 500nA, 1.8V Of course that's dependent on what' you're doing with the io pins etc. See:http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/40001585D.pdf http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/40001585D.pd... edit: fix typo
- makomk 11y ago
  For comparison, TI's MSP432 series is specified at 90 uA/MHz running, 850nA sleep with RTC enabled - and that's a Cortex M4 part with hardware FPU, not even an M0. I think Atmel's newest low-power M0 parts are even more impressive. Plus the Internet of Things means companies are wanting to run increasingly demanding code on low-power embedded devices. 8-bit chips are getting squeezed hard by ARM.