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Youself
and far more expensive... therein lies the rub
David Brown
Well, I know they have been active in bringing out new devices - the most recent ...
XMOS repositions itself as MCU company
Peter Clarke
10/16/2012 9:00 AM EDT
LONDON – XMOS Ltd. (Bristol, England), a pioneer in C-level programmable event-driven, multicore processors, is launching tools and IP that are part of a repositioning of the company as a high-end microcontroller company.
The company reckons that the parallelism of its chips it can provide up to ten times the performance of leading 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) at a similar price point.
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The company has upgraded the Eclipse-based xTIMEcomposer Studio development environment to version 12.0 and moved it across from GCC- to LLVM-based C and C++ compilation. The move has produced marked improvements in compile time (40 percent), run-time performance (60 percent) and reduced code size (17 percent) over the previous version.
The company is also launching the xSOFTip library. This is a range of more than 40 software blocks for the implementation of peripheral functions including interfaces, DSP routines and communication protocols. A free-to-download GUI-based tool called xSOFTip Explorer allows developers to easily browse available xSOFTip blocks and quickly configure xCORE devices with the interfaces and peripherals they need. It has a drag-and-drop interface and provides feedback on chip resources used together with online documentation and example device usage.
Still downloadable at present the vision is to have xSOFTip as a web-based design entry tool, said Ali Dixon, co-founder and director of product management at XMOS.
The new IP and design flow is going to increase the market reach of XMOS silicon, the company said. In its six years to date the company has achieved traction in some audio and control applications that are suited to its highly responsive and deterministic processing style. XMOS is now aiming to address a broader range of embedded applications that demand real-time performance beyond the capabilities of traditional microcontrollers (MCUs).
Click on image to enlarge.
How XMOS positions itself in a $76 billion market opportunity
For now XMOS tools support the same set of chips the company has been offering. Nigel Toon, CEO of XMOS, said that over the next six months there will be more XMOS components. The company has used a 65-nm digital process for the event-driven processors with the option to include application-specific mixed-signal die that provide dedicated physical interfaces and additional functions in a more relaxed manufacturing process.
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JB65
10/17/2012 10:47 AM EDT
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David Brown
10/18/2012 5:05 AM EDT
The XMOS chips are a nice architecture, but they suffer greatly from a lack of memory. There is just 64K per core for both program and data, and no sensible way to connect external memories (you can make a memory interface in software, but that uses up most of the pins and resources on the device!).
With at least 512 KB ram per core, and preferably with flash for bootloading on chip, these would be far more useful devices.
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Youself
3/4/2013 12:24 PM EST
and far more expensive... therein lies the rub
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peter.clarke
10/18/2012 8:01 AM EDT
@David Brown
You make a good point about lack of memory.
CEO Nigel Toon indicated that more components are in the pipeline, but did not wish to tip his hand about what is coming in the next three to six months.
So maybe XMOS is addressing that with a respin of silicon - or perhaps not. We wait to find out.
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David Brown
10/18/2012 8:45 AM EDT
Well, I know they have been active in bringing out new devices - the most recent ones having a USB 2.0 PHY integrated in the chip.
However, there are least some architectural and software issues involved in using more than 64KB memory, so it is not quite as simple as putting a bigger SRAM macro in the design. So I'm not going to put money on bigger ram blocks in the next versions - but I would definitely like to see it in the future.
The other big problems I see with the XMOS lie with their development tools and the limitations of the "XC" language. But it is quite possible that this has changed now with the new tools they have released - I haven't tried them, and it would be unfair to complain about old problems before checking if they are now fixed.
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