alt Hacker NewsCortex-M is a lovely platform. Shame it has stagnated. Both STM32H7 (or N6) or NXP RT1170/80 beg for a major update - more performance, inclusion of NEON (or equivalent), support for DDR3 at least, PCIe?
It would be amazing for doing some more complex DSP.
Otherwise using those platforms is a bit like programming on 8086 today. Fun. You get basic stuff done and then you hit a wall. Only option is to jump on SoM stuff or FPGA which is another can of worms in itself.
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ST seems to consistently put out faster chips [1]. I think the better question is why bother though? The real reason to use a Cortex-M is determinism in hard real-time systems. I'm sure DDR3 and PCIe would be cool in an MCU and people would certainly make some interesting things with it, but at that point you either aren't making a hard real-time system and would benefit greatly from an MPU, allowing you to run Linux and benefit from the wealth of drivers available for these interfaces, or your real-time deadlines are so tight an FPGA would be a better choice. The real advantage of the Cortex-Ms is that they can be manufactured on ancient process nodes for next to nothing. The moment you don't care about that, why not upgrade to an i.MX8?
[1] https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/campaigns/stm32v8-high-...
>Cortex-M is a lovely platform. Shame it has stagnated.
Cortex-M is the Arm Inc. micro-controller (or MCU) profile, hence them M, so DDR3 or PCIe are out of scope here. You also only run thumb code on the M profile.
edit: Did you mean STM32 Nucleo, the line of MCU dev boards from ST?
> Otherwise using those platforms is a bit like programming on 8086 today. Fun. You get basic stuff done and then you hit a wall.
If these platforms are as problematic as you claim then they would not sell as well as they do. The problem is not the platform but how you are using it.
> Only option is to jump on SoM stuff or FPGA which is another can of worms in itself.
Only? For what application? SoM means system on module and is nothing more than a ready to run CPU board you plug into your circuit board. Do you mean an applications CPU running a general purpose OS like Linux? And an FPGA is a completely different animal. Normally an FPGA is needed when you need specific custom logic to accomplish a task OR interfacing hardware with glue logic. Otherwise programming an FPGA is way more difficult than an MCU.