ARM or MICROCHIP

[bahya]

Hello,
Can you help me to find the differences between ARM and Microchip. I'm supposed to choose between both of them to program it in C and to justify my choice .
Thanks.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

What are you trying to do with them?.

ARM is generally larger, faster, more powerful and more expensive.

Some PIC's are small enough and cheap to replace other cheap chips (such as 555 timers), with the higher ends ones still large , fast and powerful.

 

[bahya]

My project is to develop a sequencer based on microcontroller 32 bits. wich one is easier to program and to find the programmator in C ?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

My project is to develop a sequencer based on microcontroller 32 bits. wich one is easier to program and to find the programmator in C ?

I can't help you with C, but what do you mean by a 'sequencer'?.

 

[bahya]

a machine used to automatically produce a sequence !!

 

[Ian Rogers]

When you get to 32bit... ARM are the better devices.... You can get a C compiler for free (tons of libraries)... With pic the compiler is over£1000 to start with...

There is plenty of support for both chips.. and quite a bit of example software floating about..

 

[DirtyLude]

MICROCHIP and ARM are companies not microcontrollers. Horses for courses. Based on your criteria to make a 'sequencer' which is not descriptive at all a simple 8bit PIC is all you need and would be the simplest and cheapest. This 'sequencer' application would need to be much more complex than it sounds to justify going to an ARM core device.

 

[3v0]

When you get to 32bit... ARM are the better devices.... You can get a C compiler for free (tons of libraries)... With pic the compiler is over£1000 to start with...

There is plenty of support for both chips.. and quite a bit of example software floating about..

I watched a Microchip video a while back and I think they said they would have free lite compilers for all of their chips. Do not recall them excluding the MIPs stuff.

 

[Ian Rogers]

I watched a Microchip video a while back and I think they said they would have free lite compilers for all of their chips. Do not recall them excluding the MIPs stuff.

When I say free.... I don't mean a cut down lite version that doubles you data usage... I asked Microchip, about a year ago... Why would I choose to develop my new systems with the PIC32 series when I can have the ARM based system ... The compiler (I need the full compiler) costs around a grand..... The Gnu toolchain for ARM is free. Considering that the PIC24 and PIC32 toolchains are also based on the Gnu compilers.....Go figure.

Their reply was " Sorry the pricing mechanism has been set, no deals are available"..... Well I didn't choose PIC

 

[3v0]

Thanks for clearing that up Ian.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

a machine used to automatically produce a sequence !!

Again, that's completely meaningless.

What you're trying to do decides what power you require - a 'machine to produce a sequence' is FAR too vague, and is covered in my tutorials, requiring very litle computing power at all.

 

[kubeek]

I don´t know what core microchip uses in the 32bit ones, but here I have ARM cores available in chips from Atmel and STMicro. Any experience with those?

 

[3v0]

I don´t know what core microchip uses in the 32bit ones, but here I have ARM cores available in chips from Atmel and STMicro. Any experience with those?

MIPS (character tax)

 

[Ubergeek63]

Hello,
Can you help me to find the differences between ARM and Microchip. I'm supposed to choose between both of them to program it in C and to justify my choice .
Thanks.

at a given price point, ARMs are FAR more powerful. I do not know about PICs free compilers, but Kiel's free ARM compiler allows you to do 32KB programs.

PICs are 4 clocks per instruction cycle, ARMs are 1 clock per instruction cycle.

 

[Ubergeek63]

at the $1.20 price point, with leads (not BGA or QFN) we have ...

In a PIC, with 2K words (14 bit words) of flash 128 bytes of ram and can execute 8 million instructions a second in a 20 pin chip: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2012/04/41586A.pdf

In an ARM, with 6K words (32bit words) of flash, 8KB of ram can execute 50 million instructions per second in a 48 pin chip: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2012/04/LPC111X.pdf

Dan