Last I checked, some of the popular IOT architectures (atmega, etc) were not included without some 3rd party plugins.
$ rustc --print target-list | cut -d- -f1 | sort | uniq | wc -l
20Nobody is going to be running NTPsec on it in any case!
> Nobody is going to be running NTPsec on it
Never say never. :) There are wifi, ethernet, and clock shields for Arduino, all of which are running microcontrollers, and many applications which would benefit from using NTP.
It's not clear to me why you'd choose an AVR for a new product unless you really, really needed a specific feature. Current generation ARM Cortex M0 devices are available at a similar cost and with significant performance gains, with the benefit that if you realise you need a more powerful core you can scale up to hundreds of MHz with effectively the same code base.
Microchip / Atmel (same company now btw) are doing an "everything and anything" strategy. PIC, ATTiny, ATMega, UC3, AND ARM chips are available from them.
It seems like the smaller 8-bit microcontrollers use less power and have better features for embedded engineers (ie: ADC converters, PWM, Real-time clocks, deeper sleep modes).
While ARM has the general benefit of being much faster from a computational perspective. But if you want to read the voltage from a simple thermo-resistor and then output it on an I2C bus... I'm thinking a classic 8-bit AVR is going to be superior over any ARM.
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I'm still seeing 8051 stuff pop up everywhere, and that thing was supposedly dead years ago.
Another hint is when you actually get in touch with a lot of complete product designs. The amount of ARM cores that you will see in there seems steadily to incline.
Cortex M0+ devices are "larger" than AVRs. You have more RAM, CPU power and unfortunately... complexity and power usage.
I'm thinking a good example is the LPC811 from NXP: very good specs and it really shows how good ARM M0+ systems have become: http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC81XM.pdf
But its still got an order of magnitude more power usage and complexity over AVR's AtMega328pb. The ATMega's "active" mode is comparable to the LPC811's "sleep" mode.
Most of the LPC811's pins only can sink / source ~4mA, while the "biggest" pins can only sink / source 20mA. In contrast, all of the AtMega328pb pins can sink/source 40mA. Easily driving LEDs with only a resistor (instead of having to hook up a transistor or external buffer of some kind)
The LPC811 also shows what happens to cheap ARM chips: they are missing ADC converters, PWM, Real-time Counters (or a deep-sleep mode that still keeps the 32kHz clock active). Sure, you can buy these externally... but the AVRs and PICs have superior integration.
> It's not clear to me why you'd choose an AVR for a new product unless you really, really needed a specific feature.
Running an LED with just a resistor on any pin is a pretty nifty feature IMO.
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The AtMega328pb is a "bigger" and more expensive part though. Perhaps its more "fair" to compare the LPC811 against the AtTiny44A (which is also $1.50ish). ATTiny44A has similar power specifications as the 328pb.
FYI: Microcontrollers really ought to just be interpreting the WWVB radio signal (aka: the 60,000 Hz Atomic Clock radio signal throughout the entire continental USA). Alternatively, Microcontrollers easily connect up to GPS modules for an alternative radio signal / alternative time source.
If anything, Microcontrollers are a great interface to the 60kHz Atomic Clock signal and are therefore would probably be the best NTP-server.
In any case, the "real" best architecture is probably a microcontroller doing Radio Logic / digital signal processing for WWVB, and that is connected through a simple connection (ex: I2C that says the last announced time from the WWVB signal) helping a "bigger" Raspberry Pi. And the Raspberry Pi can handle the ethernet / server stuff
Erm, like, all of them? ARM has a 24% market share in microcontrollers, and 70% in 32-bit microcontrollers.
Source (page 21): https://www.arm.com/zh/files/event/1_2015_ARM_Embedded_Semin...
Here are a ton of Arduino-style boards with ARM chips: https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/
I just counted on nightly and got 20 distinct architectures, including all the le variants; every distinct architecture value, iow.