When will the 8051 and othe 8-bits go away?

On 7 Jul 2005 14:32:11 -0700, kerlin88@yahoo.com wrote:

>In my experience it like this- people learn a micro at collage or where
>ever. They know this micro and that makes it easy for them to use. They
>use it in every application, regardless of whether it is suitable or
>not.

Computer manufacturers have known this for quite a few decades. Many
had educational institution prices for the hardware and the system was
often delivered loaded with all kinds of software, which for a
commercial customer would have costed a lot. By creating a pool of
graduates familiar with their system, this also helped in selling
similar systems to commercial customers, when there was a pool of
trained professionals when otherwise it was hard to find
professionals. In a few years, these people might also be selecting
the hardware.

Later on, the microprocessor vendors eagerly donated Intel Intellecs
and Motorola Exorcisers with some local media visibility. Other
processor vendors that did not donate development systems, had later
on very hard to get their processors into products designed by the
graduated students, even if the technical merits were better.

This is really not a new thing, since all vendors try to get a good
visibility in educational institutions, thus some institutions have
rules what donations they can accept and independently decide what
systems to buy, in order to avoid any unfair competition advantages. 

In a growing economy with limited resources, it is tempting to get all
the donations that you can get.

Paul
    

"Guy Macon" <_see.web.page_@_www.guymacon.com_> wrote in message
news:11cb9a2eeej5bca@corp.supernews.com...
>
>
>
> My predictions:

I take the bit-ness of a CPU in terms of addressing - bus sizes and such
are irrelevant as 256-bit wide buses and 128-bit SIMD registers are already
in widespread use today and there is no reason to believe we won't end up
with over 1024-bit wide (internal) buses in the near future.

>   4-bits will only be used for extreme low power.
>   8-bits will never go away.  Perfect for toys, keyboards, etc.
>  16-bits will not exist by the year 2020.

I agree with the argument 16-bit is being squeezed by both 8 and
32-bits, but they won't disappear from niches - just like there will
always remain niches for 4 and 8-bits for cost, power or pin reasons.

>  32-bits will be here forever.  Great size for demanding embedded apps.

Definitely.

>  64-bits will not exist by the year 2040.

Sounds very unlikely. The demand of 64-bit is driven by the need to
address large virtual memories, have over 4GB of RAM and the
affordability of it. 64-bits is just about enough to use as a single
virtual address space for most desktop PCs in the world (250 million
PCs each using 100GB of harddisc space), so a 64-bit virtual addresses
will be sufficient for desktop systems this century.

Having 2^64 bytes of RAM is going to be unlikely unless there are
are several major breakthroughs in the number of atoms needed to
store a bit. If current DRAM densities grew by a factor of 2 every 2
years (it is extremely optimistic to assume this rate is sustainable
indefinitely), it would take until 2070 before you could have a DIMM
with 2^64 bytes of memory.

> 128-bits will not exist by the year 2060.
> 256-bits will become the top-end.
> 512-bits and higher will never happen.

I don't believe any of these will ever happen. 96-bit addressing might be
adopted but even that is exceedingly unlikely - getting anywhere near that
amount of RAM would imply single bit electron or photon based storage.
More likely is that the concept of "addressing" will change radically before
we reach the 64-bit limit.

Wilco

On Fri, 08 Jul 2005 02:03:21 GMT, Ben Bradley
<ben_nospam_bradley@frontiernet.net> wrote:

>   I just thought of a LARGE volume embedded DSP market: Cell phones
>(there's also mp3 players such as the ipod, but that's minor compared
>to cellphones). Do any of them use some other microcontroller in
>addition to the DSP (perhaps for a very low power mode, though the
>DSP's I've seen can operate over quite a range of MIPS and currents)?

About 70% use ARM cores with one or two DSPs on the same chip.
Some high-end phones integrate two ARM cores and two DSPs.

Stephen

--
Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@INVALID.mpeltd.demon.co.uk
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeltd.demon.co.uk - free VFX Forth downloads

On 2005-07-08, Ben Bradley <ben_nospam_bradley@frontiernet.net> wrote:

>>What bugs me about this article (and even this thread) is the lack
>>of mention of DSP's - 16-bit fixed-point DSP's thesedays just happen
>>to be microcontrollers with DSP CPU cores. They're probably not the
>>majority of the 16-bit market, but I wonder what the percentage is.
>
>    I just thought of a LARGE volume embedded DSP market: Cell phones
> (there's also mp3 players such as the ipod, but that's minor compared
> to cellphones). Do any of them use some other microcontroller in
> addition to the DSP (perhaps for a very low power mode, though the
> DSP's I've seen can operate over quite a range of MIPS and currents)?

AFAIK, cellular phones all have a "general-purpose" CPU core.
According articles I've read, ARM is the most popular CPU core
for cellular phones.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Isn't this my STOP?!
                                  at               
                               visi.com            

kerlin88@yahoo.com wrote:

>In my experience it like this- people learn a micro at collage or where
>ever. They know this micro and that makes it easy for them to use. They
>use it in every application, regardless of whether it is suitable or
>not.

http://www.google.com/search?q=baby-duck-syndrome

Bryan Hackney wrote:
>
>Eric Smith wrote:
>
>> Don McKenzie <look@mysig.com> writes:
>> 
>>>It seems like only yesterday when Bill Gates said: "Who would ever
>>>want more than 640K?"
>> 
>> Actually, it seems like never, since he didn't say that.
>
>You generally cannot prove a negative statement.

"He didn't say that" is informal shorthand for "there isn't a shred 
of evidence that he ever said that, the first "quotes" are from
long after he was supposed to have said that, he denies ever saying
that, many people have seached and searched to try to find the
source of the "quote" and failed, and the 640K limit was not a
microsoft decision but rather an Intel/IBM decision."



  

William Meyer wrote:

>Are you quibbling over the exact wording? Because he did say, many years 
>ago, something about 640K being enough for anybody.

Evidence, please.

"Guy Macon" <_see.web.page_@_www.guymacon.com_> wrote in message
news:11cte84hh2dic45@corp.supernews.com...
>
>
>
> William Meyer wrote:
>
> >Are you quibbling over the exact wording? Because he did say, many years
> >ago, something about 640K being enough for anybody.
>
> Evidence, please.
>

As Bryan says, you can't prove a negative. So, the nay-sayers don't have to
do anything: they have the logic on their side.
The aye-sayers OTOH may be able to prove they're right, but not necessarily
so: the problem can be undicidable. Sitting comfortable on their ass the
nay-sayers will demand definite proof, in the form of a written and signed
document or a voice recording, and when such a document is found, they'll
ask more proof: prove that it's really BG's signature, prove that it's his
voice.
Bottom line, neither one can prove he said it or didn't.

Time for another approach: why was video memory placed at the top of a 1MB
memory map, with a RAM limit of 640K? It was all the 8088 could do. So that
was what Microsoft had to work with in the first place. At that time nobody
(not IBM nor BG) seemed to see the wall ahead.
I've always found that IBM made a very poor choice at that time by choosing
for the 8-bit 8088 with it's 64K segments which has bugged developers for
many years. IMO the 68000 was a far better uP. It had a flat memory map of
16 MB, a set of general-purpose 32-bit registers and a neater instruction
set.

Steven

steven wrote:

> Time for another approach: why was video memory placed at the top of a 1MB
> memory map, with a RAM limit of 640K? It was all the 8088 could do. So
> that was what Microsoft had to work with in the first place. At that time
> nobody (not IBM nor BG) seemed to see the wall ahead.
> I've always found that IBM made a very poor choice at that time by
> choosing for the 8-bit 8088 with it's 64K segments which has bugged
> developers for many years. IMO the 68000 was a far better uP. It had a
> flat memory map of 16 MB, a set of general-purpose 32-bit registers and a
> neater instruction set.

There are probably many reasons why IBM chose to use the 8088 instead of 
the 68000. I always felt that their decision was poor. At the time the 
first IBM PC's came out I was running a BBC-B micro with 5.25" floppies. 
Shortly after I aquired an Atari-ST. It was only a couple of years later 
that I swapped the ST for the Atari-Mega-ST to which I added a laser 
printer. I have never managed to find software that performed like that I 
used on the Mega-ST in the PC world (I was running quite a full featured 
DTP system which produced all my documentation, I also ran GemForth on that 
and was able to communicated between the Atari's and BBC Micro. My first PC 
was actually a Zenith laptop (because I was after an easily portable 
solution at the time) and used MPE's PowerForth and cross-compiler tools to 
develop systems for the nuclear industry.

Systems I was developing in that period of time used the 6809/6309 
processors. I did have a 68000 to play with but never needed the power in 
the applications I was dealing with at the time.

I expect that IBM felt that the price of the 8088 was a better deal than 
what Motorola were offering the 68000 for at the time. I guess the 68000 
was quite new at the time they were developing the design. By the time the 
PC came about I had already been developing systems with 6800/6809 for a 
while and had dealt with some mini-computer systems (GA SPC12, SPC16 and 
Prime family). Perhaps there may be others who know what was in the minds 
of the PC developers at the time.

-- 
********************************************************************
Paul E. Bennett ....................<email://peb@amleth.demon.co.uk>
Forth based HIDECS Consultancy .....<http://www.amleth.demon.co.uk/>
Mob: +44 (0)7811-639972
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Going Forth Safely ....EBA. http://www.electric-boat-association.org.uk/
********************************************************************

"Paul E. Bennett" <peb@amleth.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:dao0ih$f8g$1$8300dec7@news.demon.co.uk...
> steven wrote:
>
>
> Systems I was developing in that period of time used the 6809/6309
> processors. I did have a 68000 to play with but never needed the power in
> the applications I was dealing with at the time.
>

Ah, the 6809! Most beautiful CISC uP ever! and OS-9 was far better than DOS
too. I remember a column in BYTE, around '86 IIRC, where the columnist
(Pournelle?) compared DOS to OS-9 as Sylvester Stallone compared to Robert
De Niro. I've always liked that one.
Pity that Microware just let the 8-bit OS-9 die. Why didn't they make it
public domain, like TurboPower, who donated their prize-winning Delphi
collections to SourceForge?

BTW, if an 8088 is called a 16-bit controller, then the 6809 is one too!
I recall Motorola had a 6829 paged MMU which extended the memory map to 2MB,
had 4 task mappings and could be cascaded to 8 devices, for 32 tasks. A real
beauty, at least on paper, because I've never seen a design withe the
6809/6829.

An aside: does any1 know if the complete Radio Shack Color Computer has been
recreated in an FPGA?

Steven