How to pick an ARM processor

Frank Sergeant frank at canyon-medical.com
Fri Mar 28 17:44:45 UTC 2003


Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 27 March 2003 23:01, Frank Sergeant wrote:
> > I've been doing some embedded system work with the Hitachi H8/532 but
> > have been thinking about possibly switching to the ARM.  Very low

> You don't say what you want to do. I will suppose you will run Squeak on 
> this thing, which will rule out the slowests ARMs (try running it on a 
> 100MHz 486 to see what I mean). And I will guess that you want 
> multimedia stuff - if not the suggestions below aren't very good ones.

Ah, sorry, I should have said more about my needs.  Hopefully I
described it better in the other message I just posted.

And, thank you for your comments and suggestions some months ago
regarding an FPGA with a slow clock versus an Atmel chip for low power
(which I still hope to reply to after I have digested it better -- life
and other interruptions, not to mention my inefficiency, keep getting in
the way).

> Intel has come out with some interesting chips in its new PXA26x family:
> 
>   http://www.intel.com/design/pca/prodbref/251671.htm
> 
> I have no idea about the cost and I hope that the chips themselves are 
> easier to find than information on their site :-(

Thanks for the link.  It sounds interesting but may be overkill for what
I need.  It brings up another point that concerns me and that is future
availability of a chip.  For example, the Hitachi H8/532 chip, while
still available, is obsolete, poorly supported, etc.  I'd like to stay
out of dead ends like that in the future.  I've more or less given up
actually doing it in the near future, but that was one appeal of having
my own processor in an FPGAs: *somebody* will always be mass producing
FPGAs, so the worst scenario would be the need for a minor board
redesign to accomodate a different manufacturer's FPGA but the project
could continue using its exact same "CPU" and code.  On the other hand,
I wouldn't automatically get all the on-chip peripherals.

Thanks also for the other links.


-- Frank



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