picrel is apparently the processor inside my car's engine control unit. obviously the hardware used in embedded applications is built around reliability/simplicity more than anything else, but i was quite surprised at how archaic and obscure this is, since my vehicle dates to 2012. everyone online always talks about web devs/linux kernel contribution/a bit of embedded stuff, but digging up this thing took quite a bit of effort. what are the demographics of the people who write firmware for shit like this?
2012 cars resemble 2000s technology instead of the modern car slop that exists today
>>108657665>what are the demographics of the people who write firmware for shit like this?chinks
I made a freertos thread earlier today but the tranny janny deleted it and warned me for help support. Dudes a retard.
Archaic and obscure doesn't matter much if it works and is cheap. In fact older is usually better for these applications because they are proven already in other applications, among other things like having existing tools, docs, programmers, etc.My guess is that the answer is kind of backwards.People need an embedded solution to a problem, and then find what chips could be used after the fact, and try to meet some middle ground with costs and features.If this chip is cheap enough and does enough, they'll buy it in bulk.>>108657729Yikes. Sorry to hear that.
>>108657665its because of certifications and how damn long they take, tricore chips would already be certified to operate in safety or life critical applications
>>108657665Thank you for making this thread, tho.It killed a MacBook neo thread before it could be born.
>>108657665My job is writing firmware for Cortex-M0(+) chips. I think the fastest chip in our system is 48MHz, and it only has 256K of flash and 32K of SRAM. My current project is focusing on the 32MHz M0+ and that only as 16K of flash and 2K of SRAM. I have to stick a digital signature verifier on that fucker. As far as demographics go, I've been doing bare metal embedded for a little over half my career and the vast majority of people I've work with are older White men.
>>108657665RISC-V is going after automotive hard. Car companies will save a ton in ARM licensing fees.
>>108657665Basically autismos and mercenaries. Everyone is "nice" enough but nearly everyone has some kind of personality problem. Places that heavily use these kinds of things build up inflexible layers of autismos until it all becomes too inflexible to change course.At that point, management brings in the mercenaries to supply the necessary impulse function to move the needle, and the autismos scramble to find new habitats where they can again dig in like ticks. The mercenaries get paid handily to parachute in, smash a square peg through a round hole, then even more $$$ to go away afterwards. Mercenary teams are composed of people who know how to do the work but got stifled being around autismos too long and want variety and more money.Places that heavily use this will have outside groups manage this chip series' move to RISC-V, for example (maybe it already happened, I just saw it was planned). One other little secret is some of the autismo types actually don't get paid all that much. That being said, the more normal ones can make absolute bank.I've been on both teams, autismos and mercenaries. I've seen some wild shit like parachuting into a company and having to figure out what to do with a huge fucking morass of code written in a custom, fully in-house language complete with a shitty compiler that spat out buggy embedded compiler-specific C code. I'd be mad about it if it didn't essentially buy me a house.
>>108657665Its probably the same people working on the linux kernel except this is their day job. Its more or less the same thing, you're dealing with software that runs directly on silicon, instead of kernel/userspace its all just merged.
>>108659907Nah, it's more of the VxWorks, hard real time, signal processing, dedicated hardware unit microcoding (like picrel from OP's datasheet) crew. They ironically often hate Linux because it's "too layered" and/or "too abstract", and your Linux code is expected to be reasonably portable C, not some autistic safety certified bespoke toolchain with extensive on-chip debugging/tracing. Your typical Linux guy likes scaling up much more than down, and these guys are the opposite.
