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Comment by trasz | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of using an eight bit microcontroller if you can get something that's order of magnitude more capable for the same price?

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Why not the other way around? What's the point of using a dual core 32bit with hundreds of K of ram for, let's say, a simple automated irrigation controller? There are applications for both.

AVR is much simpler architecture-wise, and this has the more impact the more you actually need to read the processors datasheet.

Have you actually compared the datasheets for AVR and RP2040?

RP 2040 is a board, not a processor. Did you compare an AVR datasheet with the ARM Cortex M0 Datasheet? ARM generally can't win this specific game against AVR.

RP2040 is a SoC, not a board.

So, have you?

Yes i have, and ARM is significantly more complex than AVR.

If you want to be more specific, AVR has no exceptions/faults and the interrupt priority is hardwired.

Edit: And AVR has only one encoding for instructions, not a big and a small one.

Power usage, for one.

AVR chips are among the worst for power consumption. An Atmega328p will draw ~24mA at 16MHz.

Compare that to an Atmel SAM-L that draws ~400uA (0.4mA) at the same 16MHz, and is on a 32-bit Arm Cortex platform.

Isn’t that mainly due to process nodes?

Assuming I hadn't failed at basic maths, the absolute max power consumption for RP2040 (implementing a media player) is 130mW, but the average power consumption in a more typical scenario would be 14mA at 48MHz.

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