gnupic: Re: [PicForth] pre-announcing Forth for PIC18F chips
Subject:
Re: [PicForth] pre-announcing Forth for PIC18F chips
From:
"Mark J. Dulcey" ####@####.####
Date:
16 Jan 2005 23:00:49 +0000
Message-Id: <41EAF211.1020306@buttery.org>
> Ditto across the 18F range, AFAIK. Makes me wonder why people still put
> up with PIC16F chips, when pin-compatible 18F chips are only pennies
> more expensive.
First, some applications (especially consumer electronics) actually are
sensitive to those pennies. If you're going to make a million units of
something, it may be worth some extra development time to shave 10 cents
off the unit cost of each one.
Second, if you are using a mixture of large (28 pin and larger) and
small (18 pin and smaller) PICs in an application, being able to use the
same code base in all of them might have advantages. Now that the
18F1220 and 18F1320 are available, the 18F has moved down into the
18-pin world (though there the cost difference is over $1 per chip --
compare the prices of the 18F1220 and the 16F628A), but there is still
no 18F series chip in any smaller package.
Finally, the disadvantages of the 16F instruction set aren't as serious
for small programs, where you don't have to deal with the horrible
paging stuff.
