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Parallax Propeller, why is it so overlooked?

rwgast

So the parallax propeller is a 32bit 8 core micro. It is what I learned to electronics/embedded coding with! Its basically like having 8 AVR chips in one and never needing an interrupt. Currently im taking the time to learn PASM or Propeller Assembly. I curious as to why there aren't more of these out in the wild? Im also learning ARM and would one day like to switch from electrical to embedded as a career.... but I feel like I am wasting my time with this chip even though its great especially for industrial and robotics multitasking at the bear metal level. I never see a propeller chip in a job discretion or in a product. To me the prop is very close to a software defined CPLD as is maybe the XMOS.

 

What do you all think about the propeller chip?

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  • clemm are you talking about something like Zynq?

     

    Ok so lets take this down to the hobbyist level Parallax has been around forever and they offer all there learning material FREE!! I am an electrician who wanted to learn electronics so I bought a friendly prop dip chip RTFM and stuck it on a bread board with some digi key parts and it worked. Next I soldered it to RatShack prefboard and added ps/2 vga and SD connectors! I mean 8 cores this sounded cool and I could use it to start learning electronics!

     

    Parallax has some boards like the quick start which are as much as an Uno, so why arduino? Why not an 8 core mcu thats backed buy a company thats made basic stamps since the 90s? SPIN shouldnt even be the issue here since it has constructs of languages like basic/python which is much easier for a coder that doesnt know C, like most Arduinoists...

     

    I am really in to SDR right now and there are examples of using the props counters only to make an AM receiver, so I can imagine the power of xmos! But what Im really in to is for an awesome SDR is the new Parallela board with the arm cpu and the 16 cores+fpga. Im trying to make the PsoC line my new chip for smaller projects that don't need parallelism over the AVR or another ARM core. I mean I can replace some complete boards with a PSoC5.... great for small test tools!

     

    Got a little off topic though why Arduino and not the propeller? Obviously Xmos is more powerfull but not hobbyist friendly or should I say newbie friendly. BTW I got in to uC's 5 years ago and at that time it was kind of like the prop basic stamp or arduino and the prop had more power than an atmeaga and was just as easy to work with software/custom hardware side.

     

    Off topic can someone tell me how to mark a response helpfull??!

  • in reply to rwgast

    .. so why arduino?

    Good question, IMHO. Why Propeller? Why anything else than ARM?

    There is the market, you know.

    I have seen so many brilliant designs die, despite them beeing much better as the dominant technology. Why everybody uses Intel CPUs not Sparc or Mips? Why has everybody nVidia graphic chips not BitBoys? (does anybody remember them?) Part of the answer is that improvements on the dominant technology is much quicker than the developement on a budget in a niche. BitBoys and Inmos Transputers for instance shared the same fate: their development cycle where so long that when their product finally hit the market nVidia / Intel respectively reached the same performance level in the meantime. So why switch? Consequently nobody did. Therefore they (BitBoys and Inmos) had no money the stay in the race.

    An other thing is that parallel programming never took of. The only widespread thing is multi tasking / multi threading i. e. running many INDEPENDENT programs in parallel. But who uses 100+ cores to solve a single problem? This is still the domain of science, not consumer grade.

    So the real question is: Propeller, why is it still around? They must have found a niche which pays them enough to survive.

     

    Just my 2ct...

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  • in reply to rwgast

    .. so why arduino?

    Good question, IMHO. Why Propeller? Why anything else than ARM?

    There is the market, you know.

    I have seen so many brilliant designs die, despite them beeing much better as the dominant technology. Why everybody uses Intel CPUs not Sparc or Mips? Why has everybody nVidia graphic chips not BitBoys? (does anybody remember them?) Part of the answer is that improvements on the dominant technology is much quicker than the developement on a budget in a niche. BitBoys and Inmos Transputers for instance shared the same fate: their development cycle where so long that when their product finally hit the market nVidia / Intel respectively reached the same performance level in the meantime. So why switch? Consequently nobody did. Therefore they (BitBoys and Inmos) had no money the stay in the race.

    An other thing is that parallel programming never took of. The only widespread thing is multi tasking / multi threading i. e. running many INDEPENDENT programs in parallel. But who uses 100+ cores to solve a single problem? This is still the domain of science, not consumer grade.

    So the real question is: Propeller, why is it still around? They must have found a niche which pays them enough to survive.

     

    Just my 2ct...

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