[sdiy] Now what?!?! AVR, PIC, or Scenix SX?

[Paul Maddox]

Rob,

> Scenix - Fast, cheap to emulate, hard to find, lots of IO.

oh, and dont forget NO onboard UART, ADC, PWM, anything, you most code these
yourself.
I liked these chips until I read about that...

> PIC - Not so fast, a bit expensive to emulate, but cheap and easy to find.
> Also, too, imho, there are too many variants.. so many its hard to figure
> out which one you want.

agreed, hundreds of them...
and very confuseing

> Atmel - Not all that fast, fairly cheap, very cheap to emulate, and they
are
> all over! One thing though: if you are going by sheer mhz, they don't seem
> that fast, unless they can do 1 operation per cycle.. If they are like the
> PIC (1 operation every 4 cycles) then they will not be all that fast..

WOAH!
ok, first, they're MUCH faster than the PICs..
With the new range you can get 16MIPS at 16Mhz, PICs just cant keep up.
ALL AVRs are 1 instruction per cycle.

Take a look at the MEGA103,
6Mhz, 6 Mips
8 10Bit ADCs
FULL hardware USART,
8 interupt lines,
SPI
128K of flash for code
4K of SRAm and 4K of eeprom (for remembering stuff)
2 8bit timers
1 16bit timer
4 PWM channels
1 RTC
'C' Friendly (it has some nice features that C likes, for example being able
to tie 6 registers together to get 3 16bit registers)

Now the MEGA128 is a drop in replacement and gives 16MIPs!!
Lets see the scenix or PIC come close!

I agree for RAW speed the scenix is better, but if you want things like a
UART (handy for midi)
then its a pain!

> Let me know if I got it so far. ;) Im really pushing towards the Atmel
right
> now, only because there are a lot out there and its cheap to emulate.
Plus,
> lots and lots of IO..

check out ;- www.avrfreaks.com and also the comparison list
http://www.avrfreaks.com/Devices/devcompare.php

If you want anymore help just ask..
Paul Maddox

(Long live AVR!)
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