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0 pointsm-ee4y ago0 comments

Depends on your audience. M4 is decidedly midrange to me. Modern low power would probably be an M0, to others it still means 8 bit AVR.

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PennRobotics4y ago

Normally I'd say M0+ is the king and offers good debug facilities over the M0 despite the slightly larger die size.

However, @rurban is probably correct purely because Ambiq is building their portfolio around the M4 (and M33), and they seem to be working hardest in pursuing and patenting IoT layouts/technologies that reduce energy usage.

I love AVR for teaching/learning, but the fact that you can* get a more powerful, larger memory Cortex-M at a much lower cost than, say, an Atmega... I don't know why anyone would choose AVR for a new design outside of niche uses.

(* - pre-2020)

brandmeyer4y ago

I love it all. Cortex-M0, M3, M4, M7, and A7 all together span several full orders of magnitude in performance. Every one of them has their niche. Unfortunately for ARM, all of those designs are many years old and they are still nearly optimal in their niches. ARMv8-M parts are starting to show up, but they aren't exactly revolutionary compared to their predecessors.

rektide4y ago

they're all a decade old. it's absurd that we havent found any architectural wins.

i have no idea whether there'a just scant dew wins to be had, or whether this complete lack of innovation is a company asleep at the wheel.

do you also love the cortex-a53 for application processing? because it too is another dinosaur relic that we seemingly cant eacape from. a55 seems to have made a like 12% difference.

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