[jdndnc]

RAM on MCUs is getting cheaper by the minute.

A couple of years ago it was measured in bytes. Before the RP2040 is was measured in dozens of KiB now it's measured in MiB

While I agree that 16 MiB is on the larger side for now, it will only be a couple of years for mainstream MCUs having that amount on board

[jbarberu]

Also curious what MCUs you're working with to give you this impression?

RP2040 is 264k, RP2350 is 520k.

I use NXP's rt1060 and rt1170 for work, and they have 1M and 2M respectively, still quite far away from 16M and those are quite beefy running at 500MHz - 1GHz.

[tonyarkles]

While I generally agree with you, the RT106x line does support external SDRAM as well. I've got an MIMXRT1060-EVKB sitting here on my desk that has 32MB of SDRAM alongside the on-die 1MB of SRAM.

[theamk]

Those specs are $50 for compute module - a very non-trivial cost.

[15155]

> NXP's rt1060 and rt1170 for work

These both have FlexSPI controllers capable of interfacing with $3-5 in PSRAM at 8M or 16M.

[FirmwareBurner]

>RAM on MCUs is getting cheaper by the minute.

It really isn't. The RP2040 has 256KB RAM. Far away from 16MB.

>now it's measured in MiB

Where? Very few so far and mostly for image processing applications, and cap out at less than 8MB. And those are already bordering on SoCs instand of MCUs.

For applications where 8MB or more is needed, designers already use SoCs with external RAM chips.

>it will only be a couple of years for mainstream MCUs having that amount on board

Doubt very much. Clip it and let's see in 2 years who's right.

[pessimizer]

Bigger processors with more RAM have always been available. The question has always been whether you're going to use a $20 processor when you could do the job with a 50¢ one. It's the difference between your product being cheap and disposable, and you getting to choose your margin based on your strategy; and not being able to move a unit without losing money, hoping to sell yourself to someone who knows how to do more with less.

I'm an Erlang fanatic, and have been since forever, paid for classes when it was Erlang Training & Consulting at the center of things, flew cross-country to take them, have the t-shirt, hosted Erlang meetups myself in downtown Chicago. I'm not prototyping a microcontroller application in Erlang if I can get it done any other way. It's committing to losing from the outset.

edit: I've always been hopeful for some bare-metal implementation that would at least almost work for cheap µcs, and there have been promising attempts in the past, but they seem to have gone nowhere.

[toast0]

AtomVM runs on esp32, right? It's not an ultra-cheap microcontroller, but it's pretty cheap. AtomVM isn't BEAM either, though. I have no experience with AtomVM though... it didn't seem like a good fit when I was building something with an ESP32 (I didn't see anything about outputting to LCDs, and that was reasonable with arduino libraries... I also saw a library for calendars and thought that would work for my needs and then I got dragged into making it work better), and it would have worked for the stuff i was doing with ESP8266, but I didn't know about it when I was shopping for boards, so I didn't want to pay extra.