3 ms·
These are all basically ten-year-old parts, aren't they?
by rvense 6y ago
These are all basically ten-year-old parts, aren't they?
- dragontamer 6y agoThey're all low end embedded parts with highly integrated peripherals. Basically: a microcontroller. No different than say, Cortex-M0 or M0+ in many regards (although ARM scales down to lower spec'd pieces).
- ChuckMcM 6y agoYes but hey, the core ARM ISA is like 40 years old. The key is that they are in fact "low cost SoCs" which is not something I knew existed :-). Its really too bad the dev boards are so expensive but I get you need a lot of layers to route that sort of BGA.
- rvense 6y agoSure, the ARM ISA is old, but a few things have happened in microarchitecture since then. I wouldn't be rushing to use a 10-year-old ARM over a newer one. The Cortex cores are pretty great compared to ARM9 or whatever.
- dragontamer 6y agoThe ARM Cortex-M3 was released in 2006 and is still a popular microcontroller core. Microcontrollers have a multi-decade long lifespan. (I'm still seeing new 8051-based designs...) There are still new chips using the Cortex-M3 today. Microcontroller devs do NOT want to be changing their code that often. New chips move the core to lower-and-cheaper process nodes (and lower the power consumption), while otherwise retaining the same overall specifications and compatibility.