I think you hit the nail on the head. Programming and programmers. As I recall, the original CM-1 was a large array of 32,000 or so 1-bit processors, which I think no one could effectively program. Then, around 1987, they changed over to the CM-2 with the 1-bit processors being replaced with a bunch of Natl Semi 32032 [a dead horse] 32-bit chips on plugin boards. Intel and maybe TI and some others also had various hypercube architectures, but I think they all died out since their target market was the same people buying large NEC and IBM supercomputers. Couldn't compete on doing things the old way.
Well, it's a matter of not really being satisfied with anything that I have so far. PICs are a little power hungry, kinda large and don't play nice with C compilers as I've mentioned. Atmel has some hardware bugs that are really hurting us and don't seem to be getting fixed anytime soon. It's been some time since I used the HC11/12/16 series so I'm not up to date on what they are like these days.
I'm not too worried about a $1 versus a $10 microcontroller, more about paying out the nose for support tools. Since we do pretty unique and one-of projects around here we're not looking for volume discounts or large scale manufacturing.
Yeah, I have nothing against hardware timers generating PWM. I just don't want to resort to bit-banging in software....
Well, thye defintiely can be done using software, but the real power of microcontrollers is having the hardware take care of the messy stuff and the software is presented with nicely formatted data. This is especially important for our applications because we have so much going on at one time that trying to manage SPI and I2C and serial (UART) and reading encoders and generating PWM, etc. etc. would quickly swamp any microprocessor out there that we might consider. I'm looking for hardware support for the various peripherals to decrease load on the ALU and avoid having to do (even more) nasty software timing analysis.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Thanks to everyone for their advice! I'll take a look at the ones suggested and see what strikes the fancy.
No 8 bit Embedded uC is going to play really nice with a C compiler; but as you _are_ being bitten by single source, and have a wide range of designs to cover, then you need to look at the uC with the most sources, and most variants : The 80C51, & also 80C51 + CPLDs
If price is "don't care", & volumes small, I'd still also look at the ARM devices.... [they also avoid the single source bite...]
Depends really on the SW complexity : One is a Microcontroller, and one is a Microprocessor moving into the Microcontroller package/price space.
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