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TI-99/4a - How critical is RAM access time?

Chuck(G) said:
Anders, thank you for the pointer to the Sanyo PHC-3000.

I suspect that TI never thought that the consumer/commercial market for the 9900 was that lucrative, compared to the radiation-hardened SBP9900 used in defense and space applications. Apparently, there were some much faster CPUs offered by TI in their SBP9900 I2L line that are almost never seen today.

Some of the TMS9900 architecture survives today in the MSP430 microcontroller, but the register "working set" pointer is gone.
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Any idea how prolific MSP430 stuff is now? In my line of work I'm exposed to Freescale stuff on a regular basis. I did play around with MSP430 while at university but not since. I have never seen TI uCs in what little car stuff I've pulled apart either.
 
I've known Michael Becker for over 20 years. He did a huge amount of development for TI systems used by German hobbyists. here's a link to the current page used by a lot of the folks who are still active there:

http://home.arcor.de/system-ninety-nine-user-group/index_d.htm

And here's the website of Wolfgang Bertsch, another of the folks I know--and also still very active in the TI scene in Germany:

http://www.errorfree.de/

And here's one from Fred Kaal, another guy I've talked to a lot over the years, in Holland:

http://members.ziggo.nl/fgkaal/
 
geoffm3 said:
Any idea how prolific MSP430 stuff is now? In my line of work I'm exposed to Freescale stuff on a regular basis. I did play around with MSP430 while at university but not since. I have never seen TI uCs in what little car stuff I've pulled apart either.
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TI"s been selling this CPU for quite some time and it's found some use in low-power applications. There are several variations with built-in LCD drivers. A very cool kit to fool with is TI's eZ430 Chronos watch kit.

But the 430 has disadvantages when compared with the Harvard architecture micros--one unified 64KB memory space, which makes instruction encoding a little less than optimal and limits expandability in the case of code-intensive projects. On the other hand, the instruction and register set are quite conventional, so it's familiar territory. 3.3V parts only, however.

Still, the entry cost is very low if you'd like to check it out. I think the "USB stick" version that simply plugs into a PC is only $20 and the development tools are free. There's even a Bluetooth version.

But I suspect that eventually ARM is going to swallow everybody... :(
 
Chuck(G) said:
TI"s been selling this CPU for quite some time and it's found some use in low-power applications. There are several variations with built-in LCD drivers. A very cool kit to fool with is TI's eZ430 Chronos watch kit.

But the 430 has disadvantages when compared with the Harvard architecture micros--one unified 64KB memory space, which makes instruction encoding a little less than optimal and limits expandability in the case of code-intensive projects. On the other hand, the instruction and register set are quite conventional, so it's familiar territory. 3.3V parts only, however.

Still, the entry cost is very low if you'd like to check it out. I think the "USB stick" version that simply plugs into a PC is only $20 and the development tools are free. There's even a Bluetooth version.

But I suspect that eventually ARM is going to swallow everybody... :(
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I have seen that watch kit. One of my coworkers has one he's been playing with. Definitely neat!

I went to Freescale's FTF in 2008. It was quite crowded and you'd think that PPC was taking over everything. At least in the handset arena, ARM is definitely king.
 
jmetal88 said:
Hmm, that's interesting. Not in itself, but in the fact that the TI-installed part is rated for a RW cycle of 375ns. That is, unless TI's datasheet is wrong, and it actually has a 320ns RW cycle, like what other brands of 16k 150ns chips list in their datasheets.
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I'm not familiar with the CPU, but at 3mhz, it should be going to the RAM once every 1/3us executing continual NOPs. Again, I know nothing of this computer, just educated guesses.



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