Inflection Points : Blurring 8- and 32-bit Microcontrollers

These last two planned guest posts for the inflection point series coincidently overlap with my latest article about how low 32-bit processors can go, so I have delayed posting them so they could more closely coincide with that article. This article would have started up a third series thread, but plans have changed which I will explain shortly in a future post.

In this latest guest post, Pete Jones of Atmel looks at the different sized microcontrollers and how the 8- and 32-bit devices are gobbling up the 16-bit processor space. I wrote about this topic three years ago about squeezing the 16-bit market, and I planned to revisit the topic in more detail with the new series thread about the low end of the processing market.

Pete talks about how 8-bit microcontrollers are delivering high enough processing performance with better cost and power benefits. He also talks about when a 32-bit processor better fits the bill – most notably data computing or communication intensive applications. He observes that the shrinking 16-bit market signals an inflection point.

I encourage you to read all of the posts for the inflection point series; maybe they will inspire you to share your observations. I would love to be able to consolidate different perspectives and lessons learned here. I suspect there are some valuable lessons to be gleaned from comparing such stories.

To make following this series easier (especially as multiple series overlap each other), I am including the index below to previous posts, both for this and the guest post channels.

Guest posts:

2010, February 15: Wireless Everywhere and Programmable Designs

2010, February 8 : Wireless baseband inflection point – SDR as a technological breakthrough

2010, February 1 : Of Windows, Newton’s, iPad’s and 10GBASE-T

2010, January 28 : Technology inflections : digital signal processing

Posts made here

2010, February 15: Inflection Points : Wireless and Programmability

2010, February 8 : Inflection Points : Wireless and SDR

2010, February 1 : Inflection Points : timeline (networking)

2010, January 28 : Inflection Points : timeline

2010, January 26 : Inflection Points