AVR-Chat

Paul, 

> > Or, why did you choose an AVR for your jobs ? In what kinds of 
> > projects,
> AVRs are the best choice ?
> 
> For me, I choose them for several reasons
> 1) They are Fast, most instructions are 1 clock per 
> instruction, not 4 clocks like certain other micros.
> 2) Good support for C
> 3) Great on board features, like hardware USARTs, PWM, ADCs, etc
> 
> I looked at PICs, when I began playing, they're slower, have 
> less features and almost no support for C coding.
> 
> Paul (still after a 32Mhz AVR!)

Try a 16MHz MSP430.  :-)  The 21xx families are 16 bit and run at 16MHz.

--
Paul Curtis, Rowley Associates Ltd  http://www.rowley.co.uk
CrossWorks for MSP430, ARM, and (soon) Atmel AVR processors

Paul,

> Try a 16MHz MSP430.  :-)  The 21xx families are 16 bit and run at 16MHz.

Hmm, not enough code space (8K is the biggest on their parametric table),
they also only list them as 8MIPs.

Paul

On 6 Dec 2004 at 11:20, Paul Maddox wrote:

> 
> Paul,
> 
> > Try a 16MHz MSP430.  :-)  The 21xx families are 16 bit and run at 16MHz.
> 
> Hmm, not enough code space (8K is the biggest on their parametric table),
> they also only list them as 8MIPs.
> 
> Paul
> 

	I have ported some MSP430 asm code to AVR asm and it used less
code space and run faster at the same clock speed in the AVR.

	Mark Jordan

If we're going to talk about MIPs for different MCUs, we should make 
some kind of effort to talk about the same metric and not just rely 
on the manufacturer's specification. This is often just the clock 
frequency divided by the number of cycles needed by the smallest 
instruction.

I have made available on my Web site a modified version of the 
Dhrystone benchmark that runs on MCUs with as little as 2kbytes of 
RAM. Click on "Links and Resources" at the bottom of any page.

Although I have only collected data for three MCUs, the AVR does 
indeed come out on top in terms of Dhrystone MIPs per MHz of clock 
rate. The MSP430 is close behind (thanks to Paul Curtis for the 
measurement) with the ZiLOG Z8 Encore! basically arriving after the 
crowd and judges have already gone home.

If anyone could contribute measurements for other MCU families I 
would appreciate it and give you the credit. Obviously the PIC is the 
most glaring omission.

Graham.
http://www.ecrostech.com