[rescue] Question: VME SBC on EBay

[Dave McGuire]

On July 31, Tim H. wrote:
> > And that was just
> > 8051-derivatives...a 20+-year-old architecture that lots of embedded
> > developers don't like.
> 
> Really?  I didn't realize they were not well thought of.  I haven't done
> any serious work with controllers, and I learned on 8085 and 8051 in
> college, so I kind of assumed they were a popular series.  What does
> make up the bigest family of embedded stuff? 68000 relatives?

  Oh they're *extremely* popular...all I said was a lot of people don't
like them. :-) I like them a lot myself, though...the only thing I'd
change about the 8051 architecture is to make it possible to locate
the stack in the external address space.  I'm constantly fighting to
conserve stack space.

  There are lots of 68K-derived processors in the embedded world, but
I'd have to say the 8051s are the biggest, especially for "smaller"
applications.

  PIC-family processors are quite popular, as are Motorola 68HC11s
(which grew out of the 6800 family) and 687xx chips.  The good old Z80
is also wildly popular today, though of course not as the
general-purpose processor that it was in the 1970s.  Atmel's AVR
family is also gaining ground.  That pretty much covers the smaller
embedded processors that I see the most hoopla about.

        -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "This isn't loose...I play hard to get!"
St. Petersburg, FL                                   -Sridhar