Dhrystone 2.1 on mcus

[Kjelt]

That is the exact opposite of reality. People being really innovative seldom give a damn about the core.

Which reality is that then? If you look around almost all innovations start with the availability of new technology, being or faster having more processing power to establish and realizing new technologies or having less powerusage to be run on different (mobile) platforms.

[mikerj]

That is the exact opposite of reality. People being really innovative seldom give a damn about the core.

Which reality is that then? If you look around almost all innovations start with the availability of new technology, being or faster having more processing power to establish and realizing new technologies or having less powerusage to be run on different (mobile) platforms.

Not so.  Simply using a faster microcontroller does not make a design innovative, it's what you do with that microcontroller that is important. Innovative new designs using old (and extremely cheap) 8 bit micros like the 8051 are regularly developed.

[coppice]

That is the exact opposite of reality. People being really innovative seldom give a damn about the core.

Which reality is that then? If you look around almost all innovations start with the availability of new technology, being or faster having more processing power to establish and realizing new technologies or having less power usage to be run on different (mobile) platforms.

Almost every part of an MCU except the CPU is an interesting place for innovation. That's why the ARM is becoming so dominant. It just doesn't matter, so people use the ARM as a default. Its something people are familiar and happy with, and it has good tool support. That's all that matters about the core for the vast majority of MCU applications. You might be surprised how few MCUs are actually running at their rated speed. People typically use a fraction of the potential core speed, to save a little current. The main reason for the growth of 32 bit MCUs has less to do with speed, than the ability to work smoothly with big memories.

Most high volume users buy MCUs for their interesting peripherals. Mixed signal peripherals are a particularly strong area for competition. Special memory features , such as fancy weak cell checking, or EDMI error corrrection, are often critical features for flash. These are the areas where you compete in the MCU market.

There are clear high volume niche exceptions to the above - DSP and control loops often push the core pretty hard. However, these are not the bulk of the market.

[Kjelt]

I know that but if you look at the last two technology waves naming the cellphone and the iPad you can hardly say that those applications could be done 10 years before they were done, because they could not at least with decent battery life time and computing power to do something that the user "must" have.  The new tech waves arise when the application and the technology are both just mature enough to make it work. And yes you can do innovative things with 30 year old microcontrollers but you can also do them then (and even better) with the current generation of uC's. At least that is my opinion. And if you talk about a 8051 you probably talk about the modern 8051 based uC's with modern peripherals and state of the art silicon but just the old school core and not about the 8051 with the parallel data and adress bus and external memory to be able to do anything.

[dannyf]

The sources of advancement in computer power have been more limited to raw speed at which the cpu runs vs. architecture advances.

Take the chart here for example: http://www.netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html

On a DMIPS/Mhz basis, the early chips (towards the bottom), like 6502/8086/186/286 are more on par of 0.1DMIPS/Mhz. The newer chips, like Pentium, etc. are more 0.5 - 1 or 1.5 DMIPS/Mhz, over the course of 20-30 years. Or 5 - 15x.

In the mean time, the speed at which they run had gone from 4Mhz to 200Mhz, or 50 times, and even more if you benchmark against today's Xeon / Core chips.

So there is not a whole lot to be gained going from one architecture to another - I think our own numbers here show as well. The increase in performance comes more from running the chips faster and faster.

Plus, for many applications, faster isn't as needed as other measurements, like current consumption.

[Kjelt]

Plus, for many applications, faster isn't as needed as other measurements, like current consumption.

And as we know from the big father processors as example the Core i_x from Intel we see these also go together, each next silicon process reduces the voltage of the core thus decreasing the power usage thus enabling faster frequencies (or more cores) for the same temperature/power footprint.