Over. 2 billion stm8 sold

[dannyf]

Stm announced earlier in April that cumulative sales of stm8 exceeded 2 billion units. That figure was 1 billion in 2014, for a chip introduced around 2010.

Pretty amazing.

Um a big fan of stm8s003f4.

[Kjelt]

It is a good cheap chip and used a lot, not the best architecture/instruction set around but still pretty fast and multi purpose applicable.
I use it for all my hobby projects, too bad it did not get the attention like the PIC and Atmel devices did for the hobbieists.
Was it only introduced in 2010? I started working with prototypes in 2008... thougt the first series went into production in 2009.

[dannyf]

You could be right. The stm8s discovery was introduced in 2009 - so the chips before that. I do remember working on cossmic plus stvp then.

My interest in it didn't take off until iar came into play - in 2010.

[coppice]

The STM8 gets into a lot of high volume, but very low price, applications in China.

[MT]

i vaguely recall ST have a free of charge dev tols suite for STM8 in contrast to STM32.

[Kjelt]

i vaguely recall ST have a free of charge dev tols suite for STM8 in contrast to STM32.

Yes STVD from their website and than integrate with the free Cosmic C compiler (one year unlimited size free at the moment).
Cosmic also has an IDE but I have not used that.

[Brutte]

Pretty amazing.

No GCC 
There are some low cost/limited commercial toolchains but for hobbyists that is a route to nowhere. Good for middle volume.

[nctnico]

Pretty amazing.

No GCC 
There are some low cost/limited commercial toolchains but for hobbyists that is a route to nowhere. Good for middle volume.

I agree. These kind of 8 bit chips are only interesting for high volume products where you can shell out several $k for a decent compiler and the benefits are there to endure yet another development toolchain. If you are not into high volume products then you better stay clear from these kind of controllers.

[tszaboo]

Pretty amazing.

No GCC 
There are some low cost/limited commercial toolchains but for hobbyists that is a route to nowhere. Good for middle volume.

I agree. These kind of 8 bit chips are only interesting for high volume products where you can shell out several $k for a decent compiler and the benefits are there to endure yet another development toolchain. If you are not into high volume products then you better stay clear from these kind of controllers.

IAR supports it. If you program micros for a living, you have IAR, right?
2 billion is a big number. Although these micros are cheaper than some logic gates. Considering that Atmel was celebrating the "one micro pro kopf" just recently.

[nctnico]

IAR supports it. If you program micros for a living, you have IAR, right?

Ofcourse not! I've been using GCC for the past 15+ years for 99% of my microcontroller projects at various employers. If a microcontroller isn't supported by GCC there has to be a bloody good reason for me to use it!

[Canis Dirus Leidy]

Pretty amazing.

No GCC 

You can use SDCC (it support STM8 from version 3.4), but, IIRC, you must write header files (all those "#define REGISTER_NAME *MEMORY_ADDRESS") by itself.

[dannyf]

For comparison, microchip shipped about 1bn pics per year, and has shipped 10billion pics in its life by one of thee biggest dealers in 2016.

[Yansi]

Pretty amazing.

No GCC 
There are some low cost/limited commercial toolchains but for hobbyists that is a route to nowhere. Good for middle volume.

As far as I know, SDCC can compile for STM8.

[dannyf]

Here is a comparison of vaarious compilers for stm8.

http://www.colecovision.eu/stm8/compilers.shtml

I'm happy with my choice of iar.

[Yansi]

I think IAR is also free up to 8kB today.

[dannyf]

By 2003, roughly 6 years after its intro, atmel had shipped 500 million mcus.

Vs. 2 billion by st.

[Kjelt]

Here is a comparison of various compilers for stm8.
http://www.colecovision.eu/stm8/compilers.shtml
I'm happy with my choice of iar.

Yes if you have the cash to spare or make money with products, IAR would also be my choice esp. if you also do STM32 development.

SDCC looks like a nice alternative but a compiler/linker is not a complete toolset nowadays.
Googling for ten minutes reveals that there does not seem to be an IDE with incircuit/inline debugger support which would be a dealbreaker for me.
I know there are last century alternatives but being used to watch all peripherals, core registers, memory, the assembly instructions and variables while stepping through the code it will be a hard time going back to logging.
Hopefully ST will integrate SDCC with their STVD IDE soon (april 2016 release does not mention it) and it would be a great alternative.
Or if IAR wakes up and offer a combined STM8/32 full version for non commercial use, priced at around or lower than $500 without support that would be very interesting as well.

[Brutte]

As far as I know, SDCC can compile for STM8.

Well, the compiler itself is quite far from toolchain definition.
The missing component disqualifying STM8 is the lack of MI debugger and the accompanying middleware.

I know of several free STM8 compilers available but without toolchain that is in no way competitive on a hobbyist market. Although I do agree that if you buy 60 reels/year then Cosmic or Raisonance license is not an issue, but then that is not a hobby.

[true]

It is a good cheap chip and used a lot, not the best architecture/instruction set around but still pretty fast and multi purpose applicable.

Best instruction set - probably not, no. And not the easiest. But the design is very reminiscent of 6502, done "right" - being pipelined, extended to support natively some 16 bit operations, have a 24bit PC and instructions for data/program flow over this large linear space, and \more. Of the low register count MCUs I've used, I think this core is pretty well designed. A context switch beast, too.

I really wish there was a core-only version of this - I'd love to build a little microcomputer / retro game system out of it.

I also wish SDCC was a bit better - the compiler isn't so great with STM8, and there are other deficiencies with the toolchain. IAR does a good job with this core, but...it's IAR :/

[Kjelt]

Biggest problem I had wth its architecture is the lack of registers, only two (Y and X) , if there were a couple more that would have made a big difference.

[dannyf]

that's true. the compilers had to implement virtual registers because of that: iar has b0..15, w0..7, e0..3, and l0..3 virtual registers for example. but its simplicity drives that low price, which drives the volume.

[bazsa56]

The architecture itself might be a bit hard to use, however overall I really like the chip. So far the peripherals that I used ended up being better then those on an AVR or PIC, the price is cheaper, and you can actually address both the EEPROM and flash through normal data memory. That thing is a huge plus for me, makes programming these chips a bit easier. I also like the stlink much better then the pickit and anything from atmel.

I'm using cosmic with stvd. Certainly not the best ide or compiler ever, but usable.

[dannyf]

I'm using cosmic with stvd.

STVD is a disgrace to anyone who wrote it, and a representation of ST's software capabilities,

They would have been far better off re-adapting one of the common IDEs instead.

I thought I read somewhere that ST has stopped its development? win-win for all,

[dannyf]

The oldest STM8 compiler I have is Cosmic 2.2.4, stamped to 12/2007, and document dated 2008. So I think the chip was introduced earlier than that.

[Kjelt]

I'm using cosmic with stvd.

STVD is a disgrace to anyone who wrote it, and a representation of ST's software capabilities,

History.
STVD was already in use for the ST7 and probably (do not know for sure) some family before that.
In the ST7 era there was no swim or easy debugger so you simulated the entire chip and peripherals and stvd could do that.
When the STM8 came I remember being very upset that the simulator was not correctly implemented but using swim and in circuit debugging it was not necessary 

So yeah it is not great and it has its quircks (open a stw it closes the window you have to wait a couple of seconds not knowing what the hell is going on and it appears again), it is slow as is Cosmic but it works fine debugging which is important.

I thought I read somewhere that ST has stopped its development? win-win for all,

Nope still new controllers are added, latest build is STVD 4.3.9 from april 2016 

The oldest STM8 compiler I have is Cosmic 2.2.4, stamped to 12/2007, and document dated 2008. So I think the chip was introduced earlier than that.

Cosmic already gets the inside info from ST on forehand, so that they have the compiler ready and tested at release. Perhaps some earlier STM8 familymembers were already in the market (automotive perhaps) but I know almost for sure that the S207 series was Beta silicon in 2008.