Comparing Propeller with other Microcontrollers
william chan
Posts: 1,326
I hope this is allowed and viewed with an open mind.
1. How many microcontrollers can change clocking speed during runtime like the propeller can?
2. How many single chip microcontrollers has a built in high level language interpreter like spin?
3. How many microcontrollers consumes less current than the propeller per mips?
4. At 20Khz clock, how does the current consumption of the Prop compare with other microcontrollers? ( when only one cog is used )
5. How does Propeller's selling price compare with other 32bit microcontrollers with about the same processing power? (MIPS)
6. How does the Propeller's selling price compare with other multi-core microcontrollers? ( similar quantity breaks )
I think if more competitive advantages of the Propeller are known, the more people will use it in their products.
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1. How many microcontrollers can change clocking speed during runtime like the propeller can?
2. How many single chip microcontrollers has a built in high level language interpreter like spin?
3. How many microcontrollers consumes less current than the propeller per mips?
4. At 20Khz clock, how does the current consumption of the Prop compare with other microcontrollers? ( when only one cog is used )
5. How does Propeller's selling price compare with other 32bit microcontrollers with about the same processing power? (MIPS)
6. How does the Propeller's selling price compare with other multi-core microcontrollers? ( similar quantity breaks )
I think if more competitive advantages of the Propeller are known, the more people will use it in their products.
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www.fd.com.my
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Comments
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Post Edited (Leon) : 1/8/2009 2:17:07 PM GMT
Sure there are the PICs; AVRs; and Arduinos, but then you have to mess around with all that <ehem> interrupt stuff
Like Leon, I'm intrigued by the XMOS chip, but @ $33 it's not really accessible to the hobbyist - as it's a BGA chip. If you want an XMOS to do hobby stuff with, you'll need their XC-1 Dev Kit, and that's closer $99!
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Cheers,
Simon
www.norfolkhelicopterclub.com
You'll always have as many take-offs as landings, the trick is to be sure you can take-off again
BTW: I type as I'm thinking, so please don't take any offence at my writing style
And for simple applications you don't have to use interrupts at all or can get by with a round robin scheduler. Mandatory they are not.
I know of two with built-in HLLs. Neither are made any longer, AFAIK. There was a FORTH* chip (R2500???) with built in FORTH, and Nat Semi made an 8073 with a BASIC interpreter built in.
Oh, yeah, the 8052-BASIC chip. You can get the interpreter on the 'net, and burn an 8052 with it, but Intel is not producing them any longer, again AFAIK.
But I do not think ANY of them had the ease & functionality of SPIN.
--Rich
* Please, no discussions on how high-level FORTH is, nor if it's a language! [noparse]:D[/noparse]
Single-core XMOS chips will be available in QFN.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Post Edited (Leon) : 1/8/2009 6:57:18 PM GMT
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Paul Baker
I really think that if they got over themselves and tried it, they'd love it. (if they went into it with an open mind)
I do believe there is the right tool for the right job. Just as you wouldn't try to drive a nail with a screwdriver, you don't need a Propeller to drive a HD44780 LCD. I simple $3 PIC will suffice. But the speed in which you can develop a project always impresses me (that coupled with the fact the I have an abundance of Propeller circuit boards around
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Brian
uController.com - home of SpinStudio - the modular Development system for the Propeller
PropNIC - Add ethernet ability to your Propeller! PropJoy - Plug in a joystick and play some games!
SD card Adapter - mass storage for the masses Audio/Video adapter add composite video and sound to your Proto Board
microcomputer wars of the 80's. Everyone rallied around their personal
computer. (Even if you were a teen and mom and dad made the purchasing decision.)
The computer flame war attitude was about a worthless in the 80's as the
current micro-controller attitude. I'm a fan of the Propeller because of it's
incredible easy-to-use power. I can understand the concept of using the
right tool for the job when in a situation where production is a consideration,
but for hobby use, every micro-controller socket in my projects is Propeller shaped.
It's just not worth tooling up for a $3.00 chip when I'm already tooled up for
a universal $14.00 chip. The savings doesn't add up for something one-off.
Sandbox in 3.. 2.. 1..
OBC
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Check out: Protoboard Introduction , Propeller Cookbook 1.4 & Software Index
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Re: Scheduler / Interrupts
I really like not having to think about both. The trade off is thinking through how to use the COGs together. No free lunch there, of course. Still, when it's easy, it's really, really easy on the Prop, so it's a net gain from where I stand.
Agreed with OBC. It looks an awful lot like the 80's, from that perspective doesn't it? This stuff is like religion, in that regard. More fun to be agnostic, IMHO.
Intertia is a powerful thing. Lots of tool chains in place, skill sets well tuned, etc...
The only thing to be done is to just be good ambassadors for the Prop. Having a lot of fun sure does pack a punch! In the end, that's what gets it all done, where mind share is concerned. And like I posed in the other thread: If the activity level sustains Parallax, does it matter?
I really don't think it does for quite some time. So, I just look at that and mostly ignore it.
Also IMHO, a big part of the stigma (which I've run into very little actually) lies in newbies. Everybody wants theirs to endure, mostly because they know the scene and change is hard. When new people enter in, they make learning / job choices. The more of these we get, the better the prop community is as a whole. So, it's in the interests of some where perhaps it's a big tougher to cultivate the "having fun" factor, to marginalize that.
Again, it just won't matter, as long as the activity that is happening is enough to sustain Parallax.
I like smaller scale computing. Always have. Nothing out there today even came close to getting me hooked. I'm happy for that, am learning a ton. I know I'm not all that far off the mark, so the mission is being accomplished. No worries past that.
...and it's only gonna get better!
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Most people relate Parallax to the BASIC Stamp. In the BASIC Stamp's earlier years there were not a whole of alternatives - mainly only the MELabs PICBASIC compiler was the big competitor. Time passed and lots of alternatives came into existence for hobbyists with BASIC languages (AVRs, Arduinos, etc. the list is long as you know). Hobbyists felt the BASIC Stamp's price of $49+ was too high for what it is - after all, they can now program a $3 chip! They probably didn't need us anymore at this point [noparse][[/noparse]unless they wanted to use the SX, or wait around for the Prop). Never mind that the PBASIC interpreter has been rock-solid.
At this point such an educated or skilled customer may not have benefited from what the $49 price tag enabled us to do for our customers. But, this price enabled our company to create a whole program around the BASIC Stamp. In other words, it generates profit that goes straight back into the company in the form of: educational tutorials for Stamps in Class; long-term developments of products like the Propeller; sensor R&D; support staff to answer questions; staff who can layout chipd, PCBs, advertising, etc. This is all perfect stuff for the getting-started customer.
As we excelled in getting newbies started we also eventually lost a few customers to more appropriate solutions for their production projects. The educators had many reasons to stay with us, and many hobbyists did as well.
So, if they expressed problems with Parallax, it's probably because they associated us only with the BASIC Stamp and they no longer felt a benefit from paying $49 for a BS2-IC. Whenever somebody moves from the BASIC Stamp to a single chip they always find the BASIC Stamp over-priced. Sometimes this feeling manifests itself in negativity towards our new products, even though no time was taken to review them. The educational tutorials, support and related benefits were of less use to post-BASIC Stamp customer as they derived less benefit from such support.
This will change as Parallax becomes more well-known for the Propeller, and appreciated for designing our own microcontrollers. People will become more open as time passes.
Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.
Sounds like a bunch of corporate rah-rah perhaps, but that's the mode in which we operate.
Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.
The propeller is great for having a wide range of capabilities and making it easy to use.
How many micros make it easy to blink an LED or drive 4 TVs at the same time?
1) Determinism : Code that's written into a COG will always run with the same level of performance. Imagine a VGA or serial driver COG that got interrupted - it would then either output an involuntary "blanking pulse" or "stretched bit" as a result. This doesn't happen in the Propeller!
2) Orthogonality : Any COG can drive any pin with any of the functional features within the chip. Period! No special cases!
To answer some of William's questions.
1) Lots of processors can change clock speed. I do it with a PIC for power saving.
2) GNU C compilers (free) are available for lots of micros.
3) I haven't investigated power consumption, but as it is such a widely introduced claim I'm sure there would be multiple contenders.
4) I was switching the aforementioned PIC between 4MHZ and 32kHz operation - the application ran for more that a year on a CR2032 battery.
5) ARM processors are cheap (with lots of performance) - but not available as DIP.
6) I don't know the answer, but I don't think it's interesting in any case.
The Propeller is a great "general" solution to lot's of problems, and represents an excellent starting point. If you start to push hard in a specific areas of performance, then it start to look increasingly incapable. This needs examples:
1) Propeller does VGA / TV output, but if you wanted 1280x1024 by 32 bit colour with 3D graphis you'd go somewhere else.
2) Propeller talks to SD cards, but if you want 4 bit interfacing at the speed limit of the currently avialble cards you'd look at a chip with a dedicated SD driver hardware.
3) Hanno does video scanning, but nobody on this forum considers the Propeller to be a serious contender for video scanning. Maybe as the background controller with programmable logic doing the heavy lifting.
4) Bean does video overlay, but once again something that would be unlikely to be used in broadcast qaulity video applications.
5) If you need more RAM... It's just not pretty on the Propeller.
6) High speed USB2 or 100M ethernet...
I have always find that choosing the right processor for a job is a long and arduous task. Many hours of reading the data sheets, trying to find the right match for a particular task.
Oh, did I mention how much I hate reading through data sheets. Especially those pages that describe how all the various pins are multiplexed between functions (I can spend a day on that page alone!!!).
One thing I really, really, really like about the P8X32A is that there are only three choices: DIP, QFP and QFN!!! And I am NOT talking about packaging - as most other chips have a range of peripheral variations just to make life even harder!
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I'd not heard much of the 8073 for years. Back in the late '90s I had no development system for the chip so wrote my own assembler in FutureBASIC (ran on a Mac). Such fun; but way too many iterations to finish the project for my own use.
But with the Prop dev system, one can get to using the Prop almost 'immediately'. Working with the Prop is really much more fun and productive. But in its time, the 8073 was a novel IC.
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Harley Shanko
Propeller always works in 32 bit
Displaying the XC-1·asembler you realize that XC-1 no, some things just 16bit
XC-1 is more powerful, that is true
But it is more complicated 16 add 32 mov ...........· ufff
I think we have to make soon parallax Propeller II
I think that propeller is a good idea
But it's bad that late in leaving Propeller II
Sorry for my bad English
Greetings
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Does the curiosity killed the cat?
Envio editado por (hal2000) : 1/8/2009 10:56:38 PM GMT
Ken Gracey
8 PROCESSORS
How wonderful is it to simply program your serial, mouse, keyboard, video, and·audio drivers all independently and not need to worry about how much time each one takes up.
And then, once you have you're foundation setup you can·do higher level stuff, like building an operating system, without needing to worry about timing·problems.
When the propeller two comes out, there will be no argument. 16 cores... you just can't say no.
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Nyamekye,
16 cores???
I think that Chip should clarify all the capacities of the new Propeller II.
Ken Gracey
It may be corporate rah-rah, but in my experience· - it is all true!
hal2000,
Your Avatar says it all...
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Whit+
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney
Its the one were Chip asks about what you guys want, and don't revive it for godsake....
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Nyamekye,
Post Edited (Kye) : 1/9/2009 7:15:04 PM GMT
A whole lot of companies just can't say that. Good differentiator.
Those are nice to have right now.
@Kye, nice job on your driver set. I think you will prove spot on with Prop II, minor details aside.
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
Chat in real time with other Propellerheads on IRC #propeller @ freenode.net
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
The Basic stamp may seem expensive, but also allows many people with not so many programming/electronics skills to develop easily and fast many different applications (controllers, temp regulators, and things like that). See it as a fast time-to-market or time-to-done, where 50 bucks is offset by the many hours saved, even for people with greater skills. You put it connect it to sensors/peripherals and done, not a bad deal.
The prop is something different, different concepts, I'm really amazed at what can be done, and how easily you get it done, the price does not seem that steep then: faster time-to-done.
Post Edited (Ale) : 1/9/2009 8:06:14 AM GMT
I think not understand English well, anything a bit difficult
is very difficult for me
So I think it is easy for all propeller
XS-1 at the moment is valuable for me (I do not understand the mix of 16bit and 32 bit asembler "
Parallax has to make a collection in the forums to get money for propeller II
I hope to be understood.
Whit you're right, I had an accident with a propeller, and this is the result
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Does the curiosity killed the cat?
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Also, I'd like to address the issue of interrupts not being deterministic. I'd like to submit to you the 8088 which was completely interrupt driven. At 4.77Mhz it didn't have trouble being deterministic. Now, if you wrote a crappy IRQ driver, yeah, you could crash the system (just like if you write a crappy hardware driver today), but that was all about software and had nothing to do with the inherit limits of the hardware (though it was fun to tweak the timer tick driver and make your floppy drive squeal
That being said, I'm still a Propeller fan, just wanted to point out that interrupt driven computing has been around for a very long time, in fact I am are using an interrupt driven microprocessor as I write this (my fingers hitting the keys are causing hardware interrupts).
-Phil
which I think is the point that mirror was trying to make about interrupts, they cause ( as their title implies ) interruptions to the flow of the program.
the 8088, was not creating the display, yes you can use interrupts to write keyboard/mouse drivers etc, but you start doing things like doing a display driver, that HAS to have the highest interrupt priority, as anything that stops that breaks the display, whereas the prop can do it because you know the timing won't be affected by anything, other than how it's coded. ( OK, or maybe a loss of power, or crystal failing to pulse lol. )
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http://www.propgfx.co.uk/forum/·home of the PropGFX Lite
·
The other reason interrupts were invented which is very rarely mentioned here is to allow a timer process to fire from a deterministic separate hardware source for waking up kernel scheduling and tasking in a determinate manner.
Of course the analog of that second piece of hardware in propeller is a separate "background" cog, and thus it is not necessary for an external single hardware interrupt to actually happen because you can use a soft-event number or whatever from the "background" cog to control kernel scheduling and tasking.
One argument is that traditional scheduling and tasking is not necessary with propeller because of extra processors. Of course those resources are limited and if you need more processes than cores, then multiple tasks must be performed in cogs which does not necessarily need to be deterministic.
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--Steve