PaulStoffregen
Well-known member
Many questions. Here's some quick answers...
Only NXP can say for sure about their memory design choices, but it's easy to imagine the likely answer: cost.
I need to be careful about the NDA, so I'm not going to comment about questions involving the chip's details or anything I might know about their plans for future chips in this product line.
External SDRAM is one of the very difficult choices for a new Teensy. The situation is similar to Teensy 3.6, where FlexBus consumes many of the I/O pins and makes several important features unavailable. So I'm leaning against SDRAM (or keeping those pins unused). It simply costs too much, in terms of lost functionality.
My hope is to move towards integrating conditionally compiled semaphone or mutux support into the core library and many of the most commonly used Arduino libs. I do not intend to make any RTOS mandatory, but quite a lot could be done in the many libraries so they work much better when used with an RTOS. This is the sort of thing best discussed on its own thread. But I will say right now, the 2 limiting factors are dev time to do this, and having RTOS users willing to help test unstable/alpha/beta code. Both of these always seem so elusive...
Release of bootloader chips and a reference board will almost certainly look similar to prior times. Never before have I managed to get these done right at the Teensy board's release. There's always a ton of stuff to do leading up to the release, and then usually a few months of highly urgent software work following. I'm pretty sure a first Cortex M7 board will be similar.
Only NXP can say for sure about their memory design choices, but it's easy to imagine the likely answer: cost.
I need to be careful about the NDA, so I'm not going to comment about questions involving the chip's details or anything I might know about their plans for future chips in this product line.
External SDRAM is one of the very difficult choices for a new Teensy. The situation is similar to Teensy 3.6, where FlexBus consumes many of the I/O pins and makes several important features unavailable. So I'm leaning against SDRAM (or keeping those pins unused). It simply costs too much, in terms of lost functionality.
My hope is to move towards integrating conditionally compiled semaphone or mutux support into the core library and many of the most commonly used Arduino libs. I do not intend to make any RTOS mandatory, but quite a lot could be done in the many libraries so they work much better when used with an RTOS. This is the sort of thing best discussed on its own thread. But I will say right now, the 2 limiting factors are dev time to do this, and having RTOS users willing to help test unstable/alpha/beta code. Both of these always seem so elusive...
Release of bootloader chips and a reference board will almost certainly look similar to prior times. Never before have I managed to get these done right at the Teensy board's release. There's always a ton of stuff to do leading up to the release, and then usually a few months of highly urgent software work following. I'm pretty sure a first Cortex M7 board will be similar.