Electronics > Microcontrollers
Old XMOS Board
Sal Ammoniac:
While rummaging through the closet in my lab, I came across some old XMOS hardware that's at least a decade old. Unfortunately, the board appears to be dead. Photo below.
Finding this board has gotten me interested in trying to do some development with XMOS hardware again. What's the latest state of the art in XMOS dev kits? I know they've started to concentrate on the audio and voice markets, but I have no interest in either of those two areas. Would the xCORE-200 explorer kit be a good upgrade from my ancient board? Also, I noticed that they now have an XTAG3 debugger--is this a worthwhile upgrade from my XTAG2?
EverydayMuffin:
The XS1-G4 is a really old XMOS chip and looks like this is Engineering Samples RevA. The original xCore parts were as follows:
XS1 G-Series (G = General - EOL'd in 2017)
XS1 L-Series (L = Low power - compared to G-series)
XS1 A-Series (A = Analog - adds DC-DCs + ADC)
XS1 U-Series (U = USB - adds USB PHY)
XS1 XA-series (XA = Xcore + Arm - EOL'd in 2016)
The xCORE-200 Explorer Kit which comes with XE216-512-TQ128 on the board. This has 2MB of internal Flash. Overview of xCore-200 devices below.
xCore-200 XL-Series (L = Low power - General)
xCore-200 XU-Series (U = USB - adds USB PHY)
xCore-200 XE-Series (E = Ethernet - adds Gigabit Ethernet and USB interface)
I think it would be worth upgrading, the new kit would be adding at the very least more cores, internal flash, USB and Ethenet.
The xCORE-200 explorer kit is the only "general purpose" XMOS kit at the moment, but I believe their new xcore.ai kit will be out very soon.
xcore.ai is a new extension of xCore-200 being released soon: https://www.xmos.com/xmos-announces-worlds-lowest-cost-most-flexible-ai-processor/
Berni:
Oh yeah these are very old indeed. Pretty much the first xmos chips.
A lot has happened in that time and you probably want to go for the newer chips anyway. If nothing else due to having more memory. The fact that RAM is used for both code and data really eats up the 64KB in those old chips quickly.
The problem these xmos chips have is that they are more of a solution that is searching for a problem. The architecture and what they do is pretty cool but they haven't really found any application where they are that much better than a generic moderm MCU. The USB audio stuff is just one thing that seamed to take off for them due to being one of the rare turnkey solutions for USB async audio.
EverydayMuffin:
--- Quote from: Berni on August 22, 2020, 04:13:42 pm ---The problem these xmos chips have is that they are more of a solution that is searching for a problem. The architecture and what they do is pretty cool but they haven't really found any application where they are that much better than a generic moderm MCU.
--- End quote ---
I think XMOS parts are a good fit for applications where FPGAs with DSP blocks would traditionally be used. Audio being the main one for sure.
It will be interesting to see how well the new part does.
tggzzz:
Whether or not xCORE devices are worth learning and trying depends on your objectives.
If you want to get a device on your CV that will fit HR-droids filters, there are better chips. OTOH, having xCORE on my CV would have helped me get the best two jobs I had, because those employers were looking for people that pushed the boundaries, didn't accept the status quo, and tried things on their own because they liked the subject.
If guaranteed by design timing is important, then the real competition is FPGAs, not other MCUs. Why - because measuring performance and hoping you happen to have come across worst-case performance is not sufficient. Caveat: if your timing requirements are simple and/or the MCU is grossly underutilised, then traditional MCUs may be acceptable.
I found I didn't spend much time on the boring bits, such as initialising the devices to do what I needed. The peripherals are well designed and integrated with the software, so initialising them was trivial. There were no unpleasant corner cases nor interactions nor errata; they just worked first time.
If you want realtime programming to be fun again, or you want to change (for the better!) the way you think of implementations, then xCORE devices are the way to go :)
As to what to use? I'd look to see what DigiKey stocks.
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