[sdiy] dsPIC33 question..

[Eric Brombaugh]

karl dalen wrote:

> The whole Gnu IDE tool chains comunity on ARM7/Cortex are way ahead
> of dsPIC. Unfortunately STM32 dont have diy frendly DIP packages but
> the devices are so cheap it's almost no idea to do a dedicated
> PCB for the MCU.

This is unfortunately true. The GCC ARM toolchain gets a _lot_ of 
attention because the parts are multi-vendor and used in a wide variety 
of applications. ARM GCC is an excellent compiler.

The dsPIC port of GCC is essentially maintained only by Microchip, and 
they reserve the highest levels of optimization for the pay-ware 
versions. That said, I've been very pleased with the free version of the 
dsPIC GCC port and the optimization level which is available seems to 
perform well.

I would note though that if you want to wring the best performance out 
of the dsPIC (especially on true DSP functions) you'll need to use 
hand-coded assembly. The compiler doesn't know how to make best use of 
the MAC resources, so you either end up using Microchip's library 
functions, or else writing your own. I don't think this is unusual 
though - even on ARM processors hand-tuned code is often used in 
critical performance functions.

Eric