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I'm trying to do other job. For now, I work as an IT engineer. What I'd like to do is work as an embedded engineer. First thing I'll have to avoid, is working for military. I don't want my brain to be used to guide a missile or so.
Anyway, in the embedded, while it's a good thing to know spreaded CPU, the SuperH doesn't seem to be a good CPU. PowerPC and ARM look like much better choice, FPGA apart.
Even Renesas, envetually owner of the SuperH core decided in June 2006 (I learn t today !) to consider ARM insted of SH !
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtm ... 187&pgno=1
If you should work in embedded, don't emphasize on SuperH. I guess I'll have to work on ARM. GBA anyone ?
I don't have any clue about the 68k in the industry, about it use, but needless to say it's still a huge benchmark today.

ARM definetly rocks. GCC can produce all kinds of ARM -as far as i know-, so you can have a full-free-software development env. It has a clean instruction set & assembly language. Because it was used in GBA, you're likely to find plenty of free software (asm code) written for it. However, you'd rather be observant about which ARM you're going to pick. GBA's ARM7TDMI, for instance, does not have divide instruction.

fdarkangel wrote:ARM7TDMI, for instance, does not have divide instruction.

No play, no gain.

There a lot of tools to develop for ARM without having to purchase any hardware:

There's QEmu Arm (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/), skyeye (http://www.skyeye.org/index.shtml) and, the Rockbox simulator (http://www.rockbox.org/). There's also GBA and Nintendo DS. All of these support for GDB.

There's also MAME which has a number of ARM based systems.

While I still have a soft spot for 68000 assembly language, ARM most definitely does not suck.

And it's used all over the place. Nintendo DS for games; most modern PDAs, even the granddaddy of all PDAs, the Apple Newton (and now the iPhone!); and lots of embedded stuff.

If SuperH is so good, then why is ARM everywhere, and the only SuperH customer that I am aware of was Sega? Firstly of course because ARM did not suck. Yes, they are both RISC, but ARM is that special kind of "CISC-y RISC" just like the other successful embedded CPU, the PowerPC. Three-operand math instructions with built-in shifts? Hell yeah! Maybe that has something to do with it.

Or maybe it was the hobbyist origins of ARM in the Acorn? Z-80, 6502, x86, 68K, sure, but nobody's first CPU to code for was ever SH-anything.

And having ARM experience sure helped a job get me last month. From them cold calling me, to interview, to first day on job in less than a week. And I've been kicking butt since then. So there's another good reason to use ARM.

There's an ARM in GP32 too, and it'll be the next CPU that I'm going to program for, and it is good to know, that you might get a job easily if you have experience with it
SH4 is another CPU that I'll start messing with (you all know where that SH4 sits in... hint, starts with D)

TmEE co.(TM) wrote:There's an ARM in GP32 too, and it'll be the next CPU that I'm going to program for, and it is good to know, that you might get a job easily if you have experience with it
SH4 is another CPU that I'll start messing with (you all know where that SH4 sits in... hint, starts with D)

The GP2X is pretty cool - two ARM processors. The main one has an mmu for running linux, and the other one doesn't have an mmu and is meant for processing sound and video parallel to the main cpu. For example, in the SEGA Genesis/CD emulator, picodrive, the second ARM is used for decoding the mp3 encoded CDDA and synthesizing the YM audio.

I don't have a GP2X... maybe someday I'll get one