MSP432 vs TivaC

Hello Przemek,

Please look closer at the Data Sheet and you will find that except for the Cortex M4F core, the MSP432 is more close to MSP430 devices...

Regards
Amit

Well, comparingfor instance MSP432P401R and Tiva TM4C123GH6PM, they seem to be very similar: both Cortex-M4f with 256kB flash, 32/64 kB SRAM, ADC and comparators, UART/i2c, 40+ GPIO, JTAG/SWT, both costing around $7-11.

The differences seem to be:
- MSP432 is lower power and allows a little wider range of Vdd; has DSP/AES hardware accelerators;
- TM4c123 is a little faster (80 vs 48 MHz), and has built-in USB and more timer/PWM units as well as quadrature decoder

How would you describe the difference? What is the TI story to the designers trying to choose one or the other? What do you mean by MSP432 being 'more close to MSP430'?

przemek klosowski said:

What do you mean by MSP432 being 'more close to MSP430'?

From a quick scan of the MSP432 TRM I would say that the MSP432 uses peripherals and low-power modes which are similar to the MSP430 family. E.g. the MSP432P4xx Family has the following which are in MSP430 devices but not Tiva devices:

a) A Port Mapping Controller (PMAP) which allows the flexible and reconfigurable mapping of digital functions to port pins

b) A Power Control Manager (PCM) which has different power modes (Active / LPM0 / LPM3 / LPM4 / LPM3.5 / LPM4.5)

przemek klosowski said:

What is the TI story to the designers trying to choose one or the other?

It depends upon which application you are targeting, but I guess the MSP432 is optimized for lower power consumption and the Tiva devices allow higher processing performance.

Hello Chester.

Thank you. You summed it up pretty well.

Additional: Also every uC manufacturer have a basic set of peripherals, which have feature same and different (differentiating is the key word used more often) and ARM ecosystem allows users to be able to switch between family, w/o having to worry on the change of processor debug architecture as they change platform and/or vendors.

Regards
Amit

Chester Gillon said:

It depends upon which application you are targeting, but I guess the MSP432 is optimized for lower power consumption and the Tiva devices allow higher processing performance.

 Hi Chester, also another point is to be compared, peripheral are a subset of 5x series of MSP430, processor is close to TIVA but if no Floating Point performance are needed MSP430 I feel as superior in term of interrupt latency and efficiency. Also MAC unit is usable in parallel to CPU so if some filter mechanism of mixed signal are based on this feature 432 is a loser. TIVA is faster and have prefetch and I presume speculative execution (Amit can confirm or deny) so it can perform DSP faster.

 On the other way MSP432 is so strange I wait for a while.

MSP430F5xx (is not recommended but was tested) at overclock is more faster than MSP432 and at this rate it outperform ARM. High speed was announced but never released so test revealed unit are more and more faster than declared.

 MSP430 and 432  are very low power devices designed for long time service battery operated devices.

What is still missing on TIVA are word and long word port access is present on MSP 5x  6x and due to family extension on MSP432 too.

Roberto Romano said:

TIVA is faster and have prefetch and I presume speculative execution (Amit can confirm or deny) so it can perform DSP faster.

Speculative execution is a feature of the Cortex-M4F, as described in the MSP432 TRM:

The Cortex-M4F prefetches instructions ahead of execution and speculatively prefetches from branch target addresses.

The MSP432 Flash Controller (FLCTL) also has a 128 bit Read Buffer to help mitigate against flash wait states.

It could be an interesting test to try and execute the same processing on both a MSP432 and a Tiva device, set to to the same CPU frequency, to see if there is any difference in execution time.

Hello All,

Most of the cortex M4F features shall be retained as is, but what is going to be interesting is the fact that the Flash Controller Architecture may affect the execution process. As an e.g. TM4C123 up to 40MHz has zero wait state, but MSP432 may not...

Now onto some similarities and facts: the MSPWare software has resemblance to TivaWare though it is meant to be backward compatible to the DRM style in MSP430 and the LaunchPad for MSP430 has a TM4C129 (something that will be seen more often) as the on-board debugger.

Regards
Amit

Amit Ashara said:

style in MSP430 and the LaunchPad for MSP430 has a TM4C129 (something that will be seen more often) as the on-board debugger

 XM4C129, it sound as recycle of silicon waste....

www.ti.com/.../msp-exp432p401r

Hello Roberto

XM4C129 when photo was taken :-). It turns to TM4C129 as production ramps...

Regards
Amit

Do you know how it's supported in OpenOCD? Tiva C series EV-TM4C123GXL LaunchPad uses ICDI and is supported, but I tried to use ICDI for MSP432 launchpad and it didn't work.

I read that the debug interface is called XDS110, and is somehow different from XDS100v2 that OpenOCD supports. Is that correct, and is XDS different from ICDI?

Hello Prezmek,

OpenOCD has support for ICDI from the TM4C123 and TM4C129 uC's EK and DK

e2e.ti.com/.../373976

Support should be seamless for XDS110 on the same line as ICDI. If not then OpenOCD must be told as well for the new interface.

Regards
Amit