[sdiy] Contemplating DIP microcontrollers

[Tom Wiltshire]

Are these Atmel AVR XMegas 8-bit or 16-bit?

I've read the Atmel pages, and they claim that the XMega are "8/16-bit" whatever that means. Elsewhere they say that the AVR series are 8-bit or 32-bit chips, which sort of rules out 16-bit. It's pretty hopeless if I can spend 5 minutes reading their website and not manage to find that out.

I'm guessing from the comments below that although we might get 16-bit multiply, we don't get an extra-large accumulator? That'd be a DSP feature, right?

Also, are there good reasons to use these aside from Arduino? Some of us are more interested in speed than ease of use or a learning curve designed for non-programmers.

Thanks,
Tom

On 22 Dec 2010, at 12:56, Michael Zacherl. wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> a while ago I started to look at the Atmel XMEGA MCUs 
> (ATxmega384A1 ATxmega256A1 ATxmega192A1 ATxmega128A1 ATxmega64A1)
> which seem quite promising to me.
> 
> The eval board looks nice:
> http://ir.atmel.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=420715
> http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/xplain.asp?family_id=607
> 
> I also found a note that there's an Arduino port in the works:
> http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1265563522/0
> http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1269500888
> 
> The ADC/DACs are just 12-bit and the micro is not DSPpowered like the DSPics but the entire package and the Arduino environent looks quite tempting to me.
> 
> Michael.  :-)