VDSP is dead

On Wednesday, 20 February 2013 16:33:17 UTC, Vladimir Vassilevsky  wrote:
> According to the information from ADI website, Visual DSP exists no longer. 
> 
> Crosscore is official successor, albeit not quite compatible.
> 
> Does this imply near termination of BlackFin and Sharc product lines? Is 
> 
> this a sign that entire ADI goes south?

Moron. Why not trigger global economic collapse by saying there is a shortage of sugar while you are about it?

> 
> 
> 
> Vladimir Vassilevsky
> 
> DSP and Mixed Signal Consultant
> 
> www.abvolt.com

"Vladimir Vassilevsky" <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote in 
news:quidnWHTBeu_y7vMnZ2dnUVZ5rOdnZ2d@giganews.com:

> 
> "Al Clark" <aclark@danvillesignal.com> wrote:
>> "Vladimir Vassilevsky" <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote:
> 
>> The CrossCore Studio tools are Eclipse based. ADI is moving in this 
>> direction
>> because it costs a lot of money to maintain a proprietary platform and
>> because like it or not, Eclipse is increasingly universal.
> 
> Have you tried GCC toolchain? Is it usable?
> 
> Vladimir Vassilevsky
> DSP and Mixed Signal Consultant
> www.abvolt.com
> 
> 
> 

If you are talking about the old 21000 GCC stuff from pre VDSP, it was 
horrible. There was a reason ADI bought two tools companies.

One thing to consider as well is that SHARC has a very to learn assembly 
language with a C like syntax. ASM has many advantages over C code in a 
SHARC. This is because the SHARC is not a RISC processor. The C compiler 
does not take advantage of the architecture. This doesn't matter too much 
with block processing, but can be an issue with sample by sample 
processing. It is not uncommon to use both in the same application and 
there are tricks to do this optimally.

I brought this up because if you were writing exclusively in assembly, the 
GCC tools are probably adaptable (but certainly not desirable). I have no 
ideal how you could use the ICE.

You can use a KIT license for free if you have a target with an ADI Debug 
Agent. Our boards and EZ Kits have this capability. There are some 
restrictions, but this is usually not a big problem.

VDSP supports all the current production SHARCs. You should assume that 
future SHARCs will require CrossCore Studio.   

OTOH, Blackfin code is almost always written in C. The architecture was 
designed with C in mind. My guess, is that the Eclipse based tools will 
work fine with Blackfin once we all get used to the changes. We use Eclipse 
with other devices and I have to say, I don't really like it, but it is a 
reality. I'm sure we will all adapt to the Eclipse paradigm sooner or 
later.

If you already have VDSP, it will continue to work on existing processors. 
You can also install CrossCore Studio in the same machine. They are 
independent. We haven't tried to migrate existing code yet (we have 
licenses), so I don't know what's involved. At Danville, we are SHARC 
experts, but we are not Blackfin specialists. CrossCore Studio migration is 
probably a bigger issue in the Blackfin world at the present time.

As a shameless commerce plug, we sell the ADI tools including CrossCore 
Studio and the ICEs (and maybe Arrow, Avnet & Digikey have enough sales ;-) 
).

Al Clark
www.danvillesignal.com

"Al Clark" <aclark@danvillesignal.com> wrote:
> "Vladimir Vassilevsky" <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote:
>>
>> Have you tried GCC toolchain? Is it usable?
>>
>
> If you are talking about the old 21000 GCC stuff from pre VDSP, it was
> horrible. There was a reason ADI bought two tools companies.

Since VDSP is dead, I have to choose between Crosscore tools or GCC.
I consider modern version of GCC toolset for BlackFin.
Does it support for C++.
How it compares to VDSP as code quality and the number of compilter bugs.
How fast is GCC compiler compared to VDSP.
How difficult would be porting VDSP C++ and asm code into GCC.
(It is no big problem to convert VDSP projects to Crosscore, btw).

Vladimir Vassilevsky
DSP and Mixed Signal Consultant
www.abvolt.com

Has anyone had success in building the GNU toolchain for blackfin-elf with --enable-fixed-point?  The _Fract type for fixed point math requires this.  THis is a powerful feature of the blackfins, but is not enabled in the prebuilt GNU toolchain 20012RC2.

On 2/21/2013 1:08 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> On 2/21/13 11:48 AM, Vladimir Vassilevsky wrote:
>>
>>
>> That is good to hear.
>> ...
>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> Vladimir Vassilevsky
>> DSP and Mixed Signal Consultant
>> www.abvolt.com
>>
>
>
> someone should call the National Weather Service and inform them that
> it's frozen over in hell.

LOL!

-- 

Rick