Xtag,Xtag2 & JTag

[lilltroll]

If you want USB, ethernet and other peripherals like, I2C/I2S, SPI and SDRAM, it's probably just to program a cheap ARM and hang the XMOS off it with an XLINK. I already made my design with such a configuration and I save a ton of board space and money.

Which ARM chip did you use? there's so many variants of them out there.

[kster59]

Check out LPC3130. In qty 1 it's $4.49. They make a $30 LPCXpresso kit for it. Runs linux, wince, etc. Would make a good primary processor for the XMOS.

[lilltroll]

OK, maybe out of thread, and someones here will probably dislike this question. But -
When you are doing designs with different types of Hi-Speed ports and you need processing power; compared to this low cost opensource proj:
http://www.hawkboard.org/ what is the tech/cost benefit with XMOS?

That OMAP chip will give you about
2400MIPS+ 1800 MFLOPS
64 General-Purpose Registers
Six ALU (32-/40-Bit), Supports 32-Bit Integer, SP (IEEE Single Precision/32-Bit) and DP (IEEE Double Signals Precision/64-Bit) Floating Point, meaning that you have
Mixed-Precision IEEE Floating Point
2 SP x SP -> SP Per Clock
2 SP x SP -> DP Every Two Clocks
2 SP x DP -> DP Every Three Clocks
2 DP x DP -> DP Every Four Clocks

at about 18$/chip with alot of connectivity including USB2.0, SD-Card, Ethernet, SRAM...



Please remeber, it's a question!

[Folknology]

I guess the answer might be around latency depending on number of threads required and perhaps power consumption, particularly when there are many raw I/O pins are required. The OMAP silicon you have shown is more like a SoC or PC on a chip and is focused on standard PC peripherals rather than raw I/O. T.I. does have some super chips in its OMAP range but they either have a DSP or PC bias.

If linux style driver development was your target then the OMAP stuff is much more suitable. If you are looking for a more event driven approach then obviously XMOS is the ticket IMHO.

[kster59]

For ARM, Keil makes RTX RTOS or you could buy WinCE for around $3/device that does all the event driven stuff and more with more advanced scheduling like priority queues rather than round robin servicing.

However, XMOS has a lot of advantages for special purpose fast I/O. Before your only options were dedicated chips and FPGAs. You can usually get away with a bunch of timers and interrupts but it requires a lot more effort.

Some things are impressive like coding up your own SDRAM driver, ethernet or LCD driver but if I have to dedicate the entire core to it AND substantial effort, it's not economical in money or time. ARM and chips like Intel's N270 Atom have a huge number of libraries for everything where there are well documented libraries that are just better.

That's why I think XMOS with an ARM Xlink would be a good solution for embedded control.

mini-PCI or PCI Express based design would also be very interesting (along with drivers).