T&L Publications

Hello everyone,


It appears that Microchip will now be making their old chips with
various updates making them much more powerful than before.

The updates (enhancements) include things such as:
More program memory
More data memory (4k) with simplified addressing
Larger hardware stack
Added instructions
and one very very welcome new feature:
Automatic context saving !!!

This is good news to me. Now (or soon anyway) we can get
our favorite chips with even more features than before.

The expected ship date is first quarter of this year, so lets hope
we see some soon.

Microchip is making AVRs now? /chuckle

Chupa wrote:Microchip is making AVRs now? /chuckle

Oh, man, that's funny! If I'd have posted it we have
a flame war underway by now...

Just like my boss said to me last week "What kind of new products can we introduce that take little or no engineering?"

haklesup wrote:"What kind of new products can we introduce that take little or no engineering?"

Or, what other products in the market are eating our lunch?

didn't microchip buy atmel? not so funny, eh?

philba wrote:didn't microchip buy atmel? not so funny, eh?

Not sure if the sale went through. Atmel was certainly
struggling, and had several potential buyers including
Microchip, Motorola/ON.

Looks like they dident enjoy Microchips shenanigans at all:
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-hard ... 008-1.html

This one says Microchip/ON dropped their bid last year: http://tinyurl.com/9kbprc

Hi again,


I like Microchip products mostly because they have been around for
so long and i know people trust their technology and have for some time
now. Of course i dont like the strange addressing techniques they
incorporate and have heard Atmel is easier to use, although i havent
used any of their products yet. If PIC's ever become as easy to
address as Atmels stuff Atmel will be saying goodbye he he.
Not that i want to see them go though, i think a little competition is
what drove MC to incorporate these updates in the first place, which
is very good for us and the industry as well.

Take care...

There were quite a few flames at AVFreaks!

http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name ... ic&t=72544

and

PIC vs AVR
http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name ... ic&t=72749

--Rich

addressing the original post, I think this is an obvious extension to a product family. Especially increasing the code space for a given chip. It really is a SW world and many applications of uCs bump into the max code space for a given chip. Making a new version that is pin compatible with twice the code space fills an obvious need.

On the subject of MChip vs Atmel, the reality is that product brilliance is a minor factor in the success of a company. Look at the intel 8086 vs motorola 68000. The 68K was much easier to program but Intel kicked mot's a$$ all over the market place. Intel was just plain a better run company and executed well on a plan to beat motorola (the Orange Crush campaign). One can argue that in 1990 the Mac OS was far better than Windows but who dominated?

Hi,

RiJoRi:
Is any of this over the recent Microchip updated devices?
Too many posts there to read all of them.

Philba:
I am very very surprised that MC didnt think of this much much sooner.

MrAl wrote: Philba:
I am very very surprised that MC didnt think of this much much sooner.

I'm pretty sure they were planning on pushing everyone into the 18F and 24F devices. But the low pin count stuff is very attractive and SW grows faster than wildfire. Also the ATtiny line was clearly encroaching their 14F and 16F segments.