4 ms·

ARM ate everybody's lunch, it seems.

gsliepen 3y ago
It comes with two XTensa LX7 cores, if you get the version with WiFi.
aobdev 3y ago
As an instruction set, yes, but I think this was inevitable with the demand for things like native USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hobbyists wanting to use languages like Python. These boards do a lot more than the ATMegas I grew up with, and while almost every new design in this space might go with ARM thanks to generous specs and low cost and power requirements, I think there's still a good amount of competition in the 32bit microcontroller market (ST, TI, Microchip, NXP, etc. come to mind).
- iamcreasy 3y ago
  Is this hardware change going to make grokking the underlying hardware schematics and instruction set significantly harder compared to the older AVR version? Few years ago, when learning electronics, I was going through UNO3 schematics and AVR instruction manual and it did not take too much effort for them to make sense. Or perhaps I am not a target audience of this hardware change.
  - crote 3y ago
    Absolutely! AVR is still reasonably easy to understand and manually bit-twiddle, but virtually all ARM cores are way too complicated for that. It is essentially required to use a SDK to handle all the gory details for you. If you want to get a proper idea of what a modern ARM microcontroller architecture is like, I recommend you take a look at the RP2040 datasheet: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.p...
nine_k 3y ago
Whose else? - x86 and x64 are too power-hungry for small systems. - Power is still up and running, but also on the high end, too (see Power 8 and 9). - MIPS32 cores are found in lower-end MCUs. AFIACT MIPS actively offers their cores for embedding in MCUs, like ARM. - You can still buy MCUs with Atmel AVR and 8051 8-bit architectures on the lowest end. What's lost? SPARC and Motorola 680x0, I presume. I frankly wonder what prevented 680x0 from getting into widespread MCUs. Apparently Phillips used it their custom controllers for some time.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Z80 and PIC were pretty popular in the hobbyist embedded space before Arduino and Atmel AVR really took over in the 2000s.
  - megous 3y ago
    8-bit PICs are still quite nice. All of them up to 40-pin variants are made in DIP package, so I can put a bare package into a breadboard and have a ton of features out of the box in the right pin number configuration for the job. People should just select modern ones, and not the same old 16F84/877 or something legacy like that, that's been obsolete for like 25 years already. All of the modern ones have very uniform programming interface, nicely configurable I/O and a lot of analog features.
    - Koshkin 3y ago
      ATTiny85, too, is amazing, having only 8 pins.
  - crote 3y ago
    PIC used to have a terrible architecture, and was barely supported by open source tooling. Heck, GCC still doesn't have PIC support, and an experimental backend was dropped from LLVM! I'm not surprised AVR ate its lunch in the hobbyist space.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > AFIACT MIPS actively offers their cores for embedding in MCUs, like ARM. Not anymore that I'm aware of. They laid off most (possibly all?) of their architectural engineers around 2020 and sold off the remaining rights to a Chinese firm. There's still a few MIPS-based MCUs out there, like PIC32, but they're a dying breed. ARM Cortex-M is much better suited to these applications. > I frankly wonder what prevented 680x0 from getting into widespread MCUs. Poor IPC, high interrupt latency. The weird mixed 16/32-bit nature of the 68000 made it easier to implement a microcomputer with (since you only needed 16-bit RAM/ROM), but would only get in the way in a microcontroller (where memory would mostly, if not entirely, be internal). It's a shame; I liked the ISA, but the performance just isn't there.

It comes with two XTensa LX7 cores, if you get the version with WiFi.

As an instruction set, yes, but I think this was inevitable with the demand for things like native USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hobbyists wanting to use languages like Python. These boards do a lot more than the ATMegas I grew up with, and while almost every new design in this space might go with ARM thanks to generous specs and low cost and power requirements, I think there's still a good amount of competition in the 32bit microcontroller market (ST, TI, Microchip, NXP, etc. come to mind).

iamcreasy 3y ago
Is this hardware change going to make grokking the underlying hardware schematics and instruction set significantly harder compared to the older AVR version? Few years ago, when learning electronics, I was going through UNO3 schematics and AVR instruction manual and it did not take too much effort for them to make sense. Or perhaps I am not a target audience of this hardware change.
- crote 3y ago
  Absolutely! AVR is still reasonably easy to understand and manually bit-twiddle, but virtually all ARM cores are way too complicated for that. It is essentially required to use a SDK to handle all the gory details for you. If you want to get a proper idea of what a modern ARM microcontroller architecture is like, I recommend you take a look at the RP2040 datasheet: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.p...

nine_k 3y ago

Whose else? - x86 and x64 are too power-hungry for small systems. - Power is still up and running, but also on the high end, too (see Power 8 and 9). - MIPS32 cores are found in lower-end MCUs. AFIACT MIPS actively offers their cores for embedding in MCUs, like ARM. - You can still buy MCUs with Atmel AVR and 8051 8-bit architectures on the lowest end. What's lost? SPARC and Motorola 680x0, I presume. I frankly wonder what prevented 680x0 from getting into widespread MCUs. Apparently Phillips used it their custom controllers for some time.

qbasic_forever 3y ago
Z80 and PIC were pretty popular in the hobbyist embedded space before Arduino and Atmel AVR really took over in the 2000s.
- megous 3y ago
  8-bit PICs are still quite nice. All of them up to 40-pin variants are made in DIP package, so I can put a bare package into a breadboard and have a ton of features out of the box in the right pin number configuration for the job. People should just select modern ones, and not the same old 16F84/877 or something legacy like that, that's been obsolete for like 25 years already. All of the modern ones have very uniform programming interface, nicely configurable I/O and a lot of analog features.
  - Koshkin 3y ago
    ATTiny85, too, is amazing, having only 8 pins.
- crote 3y ago
  PIC used to have a terrible architecture, and was barely supported by open source tooling. Heck, GCC still doesn't have PIC support, and an experimental backend was dropped from LLVM! I'm not surprised AVR ate its lunch in the hobbyist space.
duskwuff 3y ago
> AFIACT MIPS actively offers their cores for embedding in MCUs, like ARM. Not anymore that I'm aware of. They laid off most (possibly all?) of their architectural engineers around 2020 and sold off the remaining rights to a Chinese firm. There's still a few MIPS-based MCUs out there, like PIC32, but they're a dying breed. ARM Cortex-M is much better suited to these applications. > I frankly wonder what prevented 680x0 from getting into widespread MCUs. Poor IPC, high interrupt latency. The weird mixed 16/32-bit nature of the 68000 made it easier to implement a microcomputer with (since you only needed 16-bit RAM/ROM), but would only get in the way in a microcontroller (where memory would mostly, if not entirely, be internal). It's a shame; I liked the ISA, but the performance just isn't there.