[sdiy] Propeller CPU

[Antti Huovilainen]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:40 AM,  <lanterma at ece.gatech.edu> wrote:
> On Dec 19, 2010, at 5:13 PM, Paul Maddox wrote:
>
>> So I'm looking at the parallax Propeller CPU, nice because it's available in DIL format, but also very nice cause it's lots of raw power for number crunching.
>>
>> So I just wondered if anyone had used it, with MIDI or for synthesis and what they thought of it.
>
> Paul, you read my mind - I've spent some time over the past couple of days reading over material on the Propeller, wondering the exact same thing, and was about to post asking about it!

I haven't used Propeller, but I did look into it about a year ago. My
conclusion was that it's largely useless unless you need simple timing
logic in a dip case. For simple mcu applications, avr and pic have it
beat hands down. For number crunching, ARM7 is an order of magnitude
faster (and can be had in a dip adapter). All three architectures
allow using higher level language, such as C.

Propeller would have been interesting if it had been out in, say,
1995. Today it's hopelessly outdated while lacking the cheap cost,
simplicity and huge existing codebase of 8 bit mcus.

Antti

"No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow."
 -- Lt. Cmdr. Ivanova