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No, the majority of embedded systems are still on Cortex-M level systems, not "A". Despite what the maker-movement and IoT-hype would have you believe, most em
by TickleSteve 9y ago
No, the majority of embedded systems are still on Cortex-M level systems, not "A".
Despite what the maker-movement and IoT-hype would have you believe, most embedded systems are not running Linux.
Bear in mind that the vast majority of processors sold these days are micro-controllers and go into things like electricity meters, light switches, alarm clocks, etc.... mundane stuff.
- pjmlp 9y agoThere are commercial Java and Oberon compiler variants for Cortex-M level systems, though.
- TickleSteve 9y agoTrue, but with practically zero customers.
- pjmlp 9y agoAstrobe is operating since 1997. MicroEJ is operating since 2004. If they had practically zero customers, they would have closed doors by now.
- simias 9y agoSure but it's definitely moving that way in my experience. As the price difference becomes more and more negligible people prefer to stick more fully featured chips in products where it wouldn't have made sense 10 years ago. There's benefit for companies to do that too, developers who can work efficiently on an MMU-less bare metal/small RTOS system tend to be experienced and cost a lot. Now if you run Linux (or maybe even android these days) on your embedded product you can basically have any half competent junior coder develop on it without problem. At the rate this is going I would only be half surprised if my electricity meter ran Linux in a decade, especially since the trend is into making "smarter" ones. Also while Cortex-M are definitely more microcontroller-ish than the A versions they're still pretty impressive beasts compared to the microcontrollers of yore. They can run at frequencies on the order of hundreds of MHz, often come with advanced IPs like USB, ethernet, DMA and more. Maybe we should have an intermediate category for "millicontrollers".
- TickleSteve 9y ago(As someone who has been in smart-metering for the past 6-ish years, and been s/w architect for both elec and gas smart meters, the situation is that the residential meters (i.e. high unit count) demands the cheapest and smallest processor that the s/w will run on. Industrial meters OTOH, are relatively high-cost and can justify a Linux-based device (and indeed there are examples out there that have gone this way). Tho due to commonality with the residential meters, it is more efficient for them to be based on the same hardware generally.