AVR-Chat

Hi Jesper, 

> >> >a reliable FAT 12,16 and 32 with read and write is a lot 
> of code. I 
> >> >don't what you are talking about but with our optomized 
> code it is 
> >> >about 50K flash and 5K RAM
> >> 
> >> My FAT16/FAT32 read/write system, with directory and long filename 
> >> handling is about 10-15K including fopen/fclose e.t.c. support.
> > 
> > Gus is running on ARM, so it's bound to be slightly bigger--32-bit 
> > instructions, 32-bit integers, everything is "bigger".
>  
> Well, yes, unless he's running in Thumb mode. 
> Anyway, the ARM's instruction set does get a lot more done 
> per instruction than the AVR, which, although being an 8-bit 
> processor, is using 16-bit instructions.

ARM can do that, yes, but they need to be "applicable".

> I have not played so much with the ARM chips yet, so I'm not 
> quite sure of how code sizes look when ARM/AVR is compared. 

Good question.  We can answer that, and we plan to put it on the
website.

> The GCC compiler for ARM is pretty bad at optimizing and 
> cannot compete with the AVR version. 

Actually, I don't think that's quite right.  The ARM GCC compiler is
pretty good and generates very good code.

> The IAR tools are pretty good though.

The IAR tools are reputedly good, but then the should be for the price!

> And, the ARM is obviously much faster.

Well, it can clock faster, but I believe we received a 48MHz AVR this
week which is pretty quick.

--
Paul Curtis, Rowley Associates Ltd  http://www.rowley.co.uk
CrossWorks for MSP430, ARM, AVR and now MAXQ processors