AVR Freaks

Thanks. You can kinda select on XMEGA if you choose PDI as the debug interface, although the XTiny parts are included too.

I come from a Z80/8051 world ('94-'95). In my circles the poor PICs were regarded as a weird brain damaged chips.

I started with AVR in '98. We needed badly at that time a simpler and smaller replacement for our big 80C552+EPROM+SRAM board (80C552 for its internal ADC).

My boss were talking at that time with a person from Cygnal (now Silabs) but they turned out to be just late at the party.

We started with an AT90S4434, soon replaced by an AT90S8535 finally replaced by an ATmega8535

IMO, the Xmega was a bit too little and too late.  It has all the disadvantages of an ARM or MIPS 32bit cpu (complex peripherals, 3V power, unfriendly packages) but lacks the advantages (multi-vendor core, linear address space, Really Fast Clock, Lots of memory.)hh

Back in the day, the PIC used to be the go-to chip for hobbyist projects.

 It was the chip you could actually BUY.  While the early Flash AVRs theoretically released before the Flash PICs,  Parallax (and others) were selling 16C84s, Windowed EPROM chips, and OTP PICs to hobbyists long before you could get your hands on Atmel chips.

I've used [Atmel] extensively in '96-'97 (AVR is supposed to be born in '97 but I could only buy chips in '98). ... Well, I'm not speaking about hobbyist. I've always been a professional.

Looking at the eMail archive, I found a message from myself, being pleasantly surprised that "BG Micro" (a hobbyist mail-order dealer) had added  AT90S2313, AT89C2051, and AT89C52 to their price list.  In late 2000.    (Hmm.  Memory lane.  The first mention I see of AVRs is mid 1997.  First mention of 89C2051 was 96.  Meanwhile, I can also find messages about the PC parallel port programmers you could build to program a PIC16C84, dating back to 1994 ("The PIC FAQ".)   Heh.  Microchip had a BBS whose contents were accessible via the Compuserve network; it's contents were duplicated across the fledgling "Internet.")

Don't remember exactly what specific chips but the datasheets/user manuals specified what IP code exactly was implemented.

DMA is usually arm, but I'm sure I saw a SPI also, at least.

Here are some ARM peripherals:

Peripheral controllers

Arm System IP also supports various general-purpose peripheral controllers. These products augment the standard IP solutions for customers adopting Arm in various systems. The following is a list of peripheral controllers available: 

• PL011 is a synthesizable Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) serial port controller.

  Click to view the PL011 TRM.

• PL022 is a synthesizable Single-wire Peripheral Interface (SPI) controller, master and slave.  The PL022 supports Motorola SPI, TI SSI, and Microwire.

  Click to view the PL022 TRM.

• PL061 is a synthesizable General Purpose Input-Output (GPIO) controller.  The PL061 supports 8 bits with interrupt control.

  Click to view the PL061 TRM.

• PL080 is a synthesizable DMA controller supporting one AHB master interface and eight DMA channels.

  Click to view the PL080 TRM.

• PL081 is a synthesizable DMA controller supporting one AHB master interface and two DMA channels.

  Click to view the PL081 TRM.

• PL111 is a synthesizable color LCD controller supporting an AHB master and slave interface and driving TFT and STN, single and dual panel displays.

  Click to view the PL111 TRM.

Meaningless. How can you compare it to any other part? XMEGA is less popular, especially with hobbyists. The MEGA/Tiny and PIC forums are full of noobs trying to get their Arduino knock-offs to work. We can't conclude anything from this.

Maybe it's just me but I find the XMEGA peripherals quite logical and straight forward. The manuals are good too.

I never used the xmegas, they seem to have good peripherals, but these are similar to the ones on SAM ARM MCUs. So there seems to be little point in using the xmegas instead or ARM, which are much more powerful computationally and cheaper.

I'm not saying there are no reasons to use xmega, people that do must have them. It's just that I can't find these reasons, never having used xmegas.

Well, that may be less often these days. I saw 90uA/MHz cortex-m devices which is quite impressive. The best I know is 45uA/MHz for RL78 devices (well, not 32bit, but not 8bit either... kind of 16bit).

For AVR devices all I got is some figures at 1MHz, 1.8V. Sorry, I want 3V or 3V3. Least, 2V7.

Found some PICs with 150uA/MHz or 180uA/MHz. Not competitive with 32bit cortex-m devices (which most of them are in the same ballpark).

These days I use 8bitters for:

- simplicity,

- low cost,

- 5V

on applications that they CAN do it of course.

5V is no longer for 8bit devices only, there are Kinetis E devices now and SAM C20/C21. I'm using Kinetis E in some applications (sorry, they were first on the market), but I still have a lot of applications with atmega at 5V, old or new. I've just done recently three boards design with atmega88pb. Just no need for a kinetis E in those boards, not to say that the mega88pb was half the price of the cheapest kinetis E (which are usually cheaper than SAM C20/C21).

STM32 libraries are the same.

Silabs libraries are the same (I don't know about EFM32, they bought it, but their's own SIM3xxx).

Same bloat everywhere.

So I don't know about your first sentence: "... like ARM, where everything is done with a nice framework and you rarely hit the registers directly..."

I hit the registers directly everytime. Because there's no thing like a "nice framework".

32bit ARM Cortex-M chips are hard to deal with only when you try to use the vendors libraries. When not, you'd be surprised how easy the things can be, if you pay attention to the user manual.

Only once I used a library, an usb library for some LPC device. I needed a composite dual CDC device. That was a big fail eventually, it kinda worked, with some problems (from time to time there was a big pause in the communication, about 0.5 seconds, which was just unacceptable) and I needed to redo the system with an external dual port usb-uart chip (CP2105).