Parallax Propeller, why is it so overlooked?

Im not sure what the issue is, but not having a compiler as well as flaunting a new , much more powerful version doesn't help.  THough they have yet to release it and its been like 4 years at least!

Arm has multiple cores and is used in video game machines.  Just much more visibility and much more market share. They've been around forever.  Using a Prop would be a risk.

Given there will be a learning curve with any device, if I had to choose between the two, based on current information I'd pick XMOS because the development environment has a C compiler, the process synchronisation is POSIX-like so familiar to software developers, the development boards are cheaper ($12.50, and is raspberry-pi compatible), the parts are more powerful and faster, and there is recent silicon so that provides roadmap assurance. XMOS is used in commercial designs, for example a lot of high-end audio devices use XMOS.

Not knocking Parallax Propeller, I don't know it well enough and I'm sure it must be in commercial designs too to keep Parallax in business, and it does look like an interesting part but XMOS are more interesting to me.

Are there multi core arm mcu's? Like the cortex line? I know that there is an NXP with an m0 and m4 or something but other than that im talking mcu, not full fledged cpu.

I am seeing more hybrids like a a9 with a fpga mixing full CPU with MCU like bare metal.

C

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??!

The Propeller chip is unpopular for so may reasons: it is very limited compared with ARM Cortex and far from cheap.

The 8 processor model is difficult to design with and this puts people off but there are worse features to come - each processor has a very limited amount of memory (512 words is tiny) and access to a bigger common memory (still only a tiny 8k words) is time sliced and so very slow. The next big issue is that the chip has effectively no on-chip peripherals. A typical cheap ARM Cortex will have SPI, I2C, UARTS, timers, USB etc etc.

Several companies have attempted to dump peripherals and code them all in software - it's never popular because it's hard work and difficult to support in practice and always gives worse performance than dedicated peripheral functions. XMOS are currently plowing this furrow and have found a few niche applications but aren't breaking into the mainstream (they've inherited too much attitude from Inmos so I don't think they ever will make the big time.)

So while the Propeller is interesting, and can give good performance if you get a job that is a really good fit, it isn't  a patch on general purpose micros for general purpose jobs - and they make up most of the market. For niche stuff DSPs are much better at DSP, FPGAs are much better at massively // and can be clocked so much faster etc etc.

So right now I can buy an ARM Cortex with a 180MHz clock 1Mbyte Flash, >192kBytes RAM, on chip USB, Ethernet, Encryption/Decryption etc etc for about the same price - the Propeller just doesn't offer anything expect less stuff and more hassle.

MK

The Freescale i.MX 6 SoloX has an ARM Cortex-A9 processor for running the "OS" applications as well as an ARM Cortex-M4 for running real-time processes.

The UDOO Neo board uses this processor.

.. 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...

So right now I can buy an ARM Cortex with a 180MHz clock 1Mbyte Flash, >192kBytes RAM, on chip USB, Ethernet, Encryption/Decryption etc etc for about the same price - the Propeller just doesn't offer anything expect less stuff and more hassle.

.. and run a propeller emulation on it with 1:1 speed (probably - I am guessing here)

Several companies have attempted to dump peripherals and code them all in software - it's never popular because it's hard work and difficult to support in practice and always gives worse performance than dedicated peripheral functions.

Performance should not be an issue, at least not for statdard perpiphals (SPI, PWM, UART, I2C ...) those are all simple protocols. Indeed simple enough to implement them whith a few gates in hardware... that's how they were designed.

I'm not quite sure what you are getting at re. peripherals - are you saying that SPI, UART etc are better off in hardware or software ?

MK