4 ms·

NXP have the Coldfire line under a "Legacy" section of their website, which doesn't exactly indicate it has a great future though. I doubt many people would be

NXP have the Coldfire line under a "Legacy" section of their website, which doesn't exactly indicate it has a great future though. I doubt many people would be picking it for new designs nowadays.

wildlogic 5y ago
I almost used Coldfire last year for a life-critical application.
rvense 5y ago
I think there are places that are invested in them. If you have an in-house software stack (possibly in assembly or with significant parts written in assembly) and years of expertise and familiarity, moving to ARM is maybe not worth the investment. I don't know what "Legacy" means to NXP, exactly. They're probably not making new, compatible cores. But if you're buying more than a few hundred per year you're likely to be able to do it for a while yet. Microchip, I know, use the phrase "customer-driven obsolescence", which means that as long as people are buying the chips they will keep making them. They still have a few 5V programmable logic devices that are maybe 25 years old but still available in onesies, and some from that series that I've heard they make as a sort of "print on demand" system if you buy the 500 or however many are in one batch. In general obsolescence in embedded hardware is very different to PC software, especially the kind that's normally discussed here.
- zwieback 5y ago
  Definitely true. Also, investment in on-chip peripherals can lock companies into an architecture much longer than on higher-level platforms. We spent a lot of time debugging DMA, SPI, interrupt controllers, etc. on a micro platform and that work is not something we'd want to redo. Basically, in embedded products you end up touching everything from the app, OS (if there is one), device drivers all the way down to the on-chip peripherals.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  I mean honestly I look at the Coldfire MCUs and they're not terrible from a specs sheet POV. I have heard at one point that Coldfire was popular with people building network hardware because they are naturally network(big) endian. I believe Freescale made chips with onboard networking support specifically for that market, too. I just doubt they can compete against ARM on price at this point. Or I suspect on power consumption.

NXP have the Coldfire line under a "Legacy" section of their website, which doesn't exactly indicate it has a great future though. I doubt many people would be picking it for new designs nowadays.

wildlogic 5y ago

I almost used Coldfire last year for a life-critical application.

rvense 5y ago

I think there are places that are invested in them. If you have an in-house software stack (possibly in assembly or with significant parts written in assembly) and years of expertise and familiarity, moving to ARM is maybe not worth the investment. I don't know what "Legacy" means to NXP, exactly. They're probably not making new, compatible cores. But if you're buying more than a few hundred per year you're likely to be able to do it for a while yet. Microchip, I know, use the phrase "customer-driven obsolescence", which means that as long as people are buying the chips they will keep making them. They still have a few 5V programmable logic devices that are maybe 25 years old but still available in onesies, and some from that series that I've heard they make as a sort of "print on demand" system if you buy the 500 or however many are in one batch. In general obsolescence in embedded hardware is very different to PC software, especially the kind that's normally discussed here.

zwieback 5y ago
Definitely true. Also, investment in on-chip peripherals can lock companies into an architecture much longer than on higher-level platforms. We spent a lot of time debugging DMA, SPI, interrupt controllers, etc. on a micro platform and that work is not something we'd want to redo. Basically, in embedded products you end up touching everything from the app, OS (if there is one), device drivers all the way down to the on-chip peripherals.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
I mean honestly I look at the Coldfire MCUs and they're not terrible from a specs sheet POV. I have heard at one point that Coldfire was popular with people building network hardware because they are naturally network(big) endian. I believe Freescale made chips with onboard networking support specifically for that market, too. I just doubt they can compete against ARM on price at this point. Or I suspect on power consumption.