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As someone who did a lot of embedded development, I wouldn't exactly call it "more interesting". More like "that shit needs to die already". The biggest proble
by svens_ 10y ago
As someone who did a lot of embedded development, I wouldn't exactly call it "more interesting". More like "that shit needs to die already".
The biggest problem with those is, that modern compilers don't support it. Well, that is open-source compilers. IAR will happily sell you a license of their IDE for 2.4k$/seat. There is sdcc, but it's no comparison to a modern gcc or the commercial offerings.
Unfortunately you're right though, 8051 processors are cheap and abundant. Chip makers use it as the go to architecture for any simple embedded processing requirements. It's slowly changing though, but ARM licensing costs are still much higher. Let's hope that in a decade or so they'll use RISC-V instead.
- vt240 10y agoYes, there is nothing more fun than moving a large 8051 embedded project from Keil to Tasking.
- mjevans 10y agoRISC-V is indeed what I thought, but hasn't MIPS also been free (enough) and open for at least a decade? You'd think that on licencing alone that'd be enough for a replacement in new products. Edit: I am mistaken, it seems that though MIPS is used in all sorts of things that I'd expect wanted the cheapest possible CPU core it has only become free for academic use. I wonder how common that mis-conception is for those not active in the space?
- svens_ 10y agoYes, MIPS is a cheap candidate for when you need a bit more computing power than just a microcontroller. Home routers usually have MIPS CPUs and run Linux on top of it. This wouldn't be possible with the 8051.