mcu high price !!!

[5282]

st and nxp and atmel make cortex-m4 and cortex-m7 microcontroller
price >6$
and at this price i can buy cortex-a8 1ghz + sdram chips
why they manufacturing cortex-m4 and cortex-m7 at this price and i can buy high performance cortex-a8 1ghz cpu at this price ????

 

[doraemon]

Hello!

I think this question is a bit out of the scope of this forum. Maybe the A8 is cheaper because of
the volume (it's used in many tablets and phones and sells by millions).

Dora.

 

[reza05]

Hello,
Please search what is difference between cpu and microcontroller.
Cpu is just a part of microcontroller.thus,microcontroller is more expensive.

 

[schmitt trigger]

Most likely is related to what doraemon explained: very high volume production.

One of the key factors in reducing silicon cost is the wafer size. With high volume one can run larger wafers.
A large volume also means larger continuous runs. This means less setup changes, better optimization of parameters, etc.

Everything translates into a lower cost.

 

[5282]

than to all
if cortex m4 and cortex m7 is medium or low volume production. what is the high volume production mcu in market ????

 

[andre_luis]

I think you answered this on the initial question by yourself. The high performance microcontrollers used in mobile phones as the Cortex A8 variants are an example of this

 

[ads-ee]

Have you actually looked at the ARM website, they have a pretty good explanation of the space that each family is targeted towards.
A - Application (basically things that are running an OS and interact with a human)
R - Realtime (basically stuff that runs fast and responds autonomously to inputs, like robotics, self driving cars etc)
M - Microcontroller (embedded design, SDR, etc)

specifically the M4 & M7 have DSP and floating point cores embedded. So I imagine besides the optimization for power and performance along with the extra baggage of extra features the die could be larger and the yields are therefore worse than the A series. I'd imagine the R series is probably even more expensive as the market for such things is somewhat limited at the moment.

https://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m