AVR-Chat

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Dave VanHorn
To: AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com ; AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 3:19 PM
Subject: Re: [AVR-Chat] AVR vs. PIC ( was Re: Digest Number 878)


At 10:10 AM 12/21/2004, Graham Davies wrote:



>--- In AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com, "David Jones" <david.jones@s...>
>wrote:
>
> > Regardless of what the AVR
> > Zealots think, the AVR's
> > are not "WAY" better than
> > the PICs, and vice-versa.
>
>I have to side with David here. Nothing is "WAY" better than anything
>else until you take all your particular needs and biases into
>account. If there is anything specific you don't like about the PIC,
>ask here about that aspect of the AVR before spending money and
>effort on a switch.

It's enough of a difference for me that I won't use a PIC unless forced to.

>I came to AVR from the Z8 Encore! with a strong anti-ZiLOG sentiment
>after wasting a lot of time and effort on third-party support for
>this MCU. After a while I had to admit that there are ways in which
>even the Z8 Encore! is superior to the AVR (though I would never make
>another product with one).

I always liked the Z8, but not the company that produced it.
Once, Zilog was on top of the world, and tools for their Z-80 products were
cheap, good, and wonderful..  On the Z8 side though, tools are buggy,
support minimal to non-existent.

I don't know on the encore, but the original Z8 also ran at Xtal/12(!)
which meant that you got 1 mips at 12 MHz.  On the plus side, all
instructions work with all registers, all registers are ram, and any pair
is a pointer, if you want to use it that way.

I used to like the Z8 and used it a lot; primarily because there was free 
CP/M cross-assembler available for them (a friend of mine wrote it), and the 
architecture was very nice. I put two of them on a transputer board I 
designed and used them as UARTs. I experimented with the CMOS version at low 
supply voltages, and was rather surprised to find that I could get a system 
running at under 1.5V.

Leon