I'm trying to find a new N scale power pack by MRC, but just about everything is out of stock: https://www.modelrectifier.com/dcpower-s/109.htm What's going on?
I hope not. I have two in storage. Your web link does indeed show only the handheld model. Maybe just a manufacturing hiccup?
They also have their JTT line of model railroad scenery items as well as other non-model railroad lines of products. Looking through their on line store it looks like most things are out of stock. I suppose it's all imported so maybe a supply issue ?
I wouldn't be surprised that it's supply chain issues. The power packs have electronic components in them - far more than ye olde rheostats of yore - and the supply bottleneck doesn't help. For example, one semiconductor component used on our boards at work - an essential one at that - was about $40-$50 before the pandemic, now they range from $100 to $350 apiece (we have eight per board). And that's when we can find them! It's a tough go for some businesses.
The Taiwan companies want to build factories here but have to wait for help. That would be a big help.
The biggest computer processor company is Intel. US owned and HQ'd in California. Seven of the top ten are US owned. Two others from South Korea and only one from Taiwan.
It's not just microprocessors, it's anything from analog-to-digital converters to logic ICs to regulators to transistors. Even some basic passive components are much harder to find. Our parts procurement guy regularly sends me a list of components that he couldn't find so I can dig up some close or identical equivalents. It used to happen about once a year or so but now it's almost every time we buy the parts to build a board. And I'm not even getting into the prices. It's nuts. There are probably oodles of those parts sitting in containers on ships waiting to be unloaded (or have been unloaded and are waiting for someone to get their rear in gear and pick them up) since before the flood.
It gets worse. I was looking for a couple more Tiny85's for testing purpose. Last I bought was priced @ $1.39 for one each. eBay has them for $11.95 and from China - delivery about 3 months out. Microchip happen to have some for samples so I lied and got 5 at no cost. Now if i can find the same although the 4mm x 4mm size - truly a tiny!
"US owned" does not mean they manufacture all or even most of their chips in the US. Far more ARM architecture processors are sold than Intel Architecture processors (Intel & AMD). ARM has about 8% of just the PC market (mostly due to Apple and some Microsoft laptops), but there are a lot more ARM processors used in embedded applications and consumer computing (phones, tablets, etc.) than in more powerful* computers (PC/laptops, servers, etc.) *While Apple's ARM powered laptops are very powerful (and efficient) laptops, they cannot currently compete on performance with high-end Intel Architecture desktops or servers. But I'm not sure the balance will stay that way. The ARM architecture has inherent advantages for scaling up, and perhaps more room for growth than Intel Architecture. IA already expends an absurd amount of chip space (and power) in branch prediction logic, trying to prevent performance stalls caused by instruction pipeline flushing & reloading when a conditional branch is incorrectly predicted to be taken (or not). ARM's simpler instruction set and addressing modes can effectively use a shorter pipeline, which can refill after a flush much faster. However, Intel did not get where they are by resting on their laurels. They still have tricks up their sleeves to keep this a horse race.
I am well aware of this fact. As I read the message (not yours) which prompted my earlier reply, the implication was that these companies were not US owned. Which is patently false. And this also demonstrates the inherent danger of moving manufacturing outside of home borders. But I digress.....
Guys, i kinda think that you are trying to mix apples and oranges. ATMEL and others are better for embedded systems as the physical size is smaller. Developing, coding and programming is simple at best. Well, coding is out there for any processor. I am an assembly type coder as I like dealing with bare metal processors and hardware. With ATMEL; maybe others, everything ( almost ) is onboard and for the most part easy to figure out. I have been working with Tiny25/45/85 and Mega320's which have all I need. For C type coders there are a ton of libraries for the embedded system types and most of the time it is cut and paste with marginal editing to get what you want. Some call this 'canned code' of which I do not trust. Intel/AMD are stand alone processors and need a ton of support peripherals depending on system requirements which expands board space. Sure the XMega line is bigger and faster although it still has just about everything you need for most applications; sans that special peripheral. 1st 16bit Intel I played with took a degree to get to the 'hello world' state - that was 486DX50 and many moons ago. I just started playing with XEON's ( 3Ghz and 64 bit ) as I have a low level app that needs to be done. At least I do not have to create boot code to get the thing up and working. As a note, Zilog is still in the game with embedded ( last I checked a couple of years ago ) but I found that most of the development stuff cost vs ATMEL/Microchip has free stuff. I still say the Z80 was a $1 wonder even at 4Mhz when I was writing code for it. In my opinion the Intel 8080(a) did not hold a candle to the Z80. Can not leave AMD out of the way back stuff as their co-processor for the '286 was way cheaper than the Intel version and pretty much the same mnemonics.
"Embedded" covers a very broad range of products/applications. Some only need a little SW (e.g. a thermostat), and others need a lot (e.g. a mid-range router, or a high-end camera). Atmel, etc. are great at the former, not so much at the latter. The latter is where ARM (and RISC-V now) cores excel. I should note that ARM processors are not readily available in stand-alone processor form, but mostly in System On Chip (SOCs), where they include lots of system level functions on the same silicon as the CPU. Another differentiator, especially for performance, is the presence of significant on-chip cache memories. While the upper end of ARM processors runs powerful laptops, the lower end runs more embedded processing applications. Another differentiation between low-end and high-end embedded applications is whether the application SW runs "bare-metal" or under the control of an operating system (real-time or otherwise). Good examples of the difference between low-end and high-end embedded applications include Arduino (low-end) and Raspberry Pi (high-end embedded to full-blown personal computer). And to bring this all back around to model railroading (ta da!), the Pi SPROG line of DCC systems use an expansion board with an embedded processor to manage the track waveform, plugged onto the expansion header of a Raspberry Pi board with an ARM SOC running JMRI on 32- or 64-bit Linux for layout and train automation and the user interface (which itself may include a throttle app on your phone, with another ARM SOC under Android or iOS, connected via WiFi). In fact, all DCC command stations use an embedded processor to manage the track waveform and the user interface, and DCC decoders use other embedded processors to interpret the track waveform and manage motor direction/speed, lights, and even sounds for their respective loco.
If there's anything I like to code, it's assembly language. One instruction, one action. Very Zen and very meditative. Assembly code can be written for any processor of any make, model, version. You're talking straight at the hardware. You can make it as fast as can be by just using the right instructions with the least processor cycles. I learned to love it back in the early '80s with an SDK-85, an evaluation board for the 8085 microprocessor (which went at a blistering 6 MHz ) that was loaned to us by the college when I was studying in electronics. I coded a clock-calendar into that, with leap years and the rest. Man, that was fun.
Mike... Ya you got it right when you say the "zen" of coding. Once I get started with an asm project almost everything goes away except the instruction set and logic to get things done. Really relaxing to me and I can get lost for hours ... Just ask my wife. Did you ever see the mini series HCF ( Halt and catch fire )? Was a story about the first; or one if the first clone creations of the IBM pc. Kinda long winded but content was not bad.
