Re: Datasheet-flation?

Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

The data "sheet" for the new processor I'm using is ~16,000 pages.
(note carefully the position of the comma separator)

In my country people would ask why are you putting decimal
comma in a number that is supposed to be an integer?
 

This is getting ridiculous.  I thought 2,000 page datasheets were
over the top, but this one is a personal record!  <frown>

Size depends on complexity of the processor, on what is included
(Chinese makers tends to have short datasheets which frequently
skip useful information) and style of presentation.  I recently feched
Intel datasheet giving essentually the instruction set, it is
more than 5000 pages.  Several STM datasheet for relatively simple
processors have more than 1000 pages.  Some STM datasheets contain
a lot of examples in C, that adds bulk.  STM has general timer
design which can be specialized to remove various features.
Instead of describing general design and then specifying features
of each timer they have separate section for each compbination
of features present in a timer.  This leads to significant
duplication, where bulk of a section is the same as section
for another timer, but some places differ.

IIRC have a datasheet with about 5000 pages.  16000 pages would
be reasonable if the processor contains a lot of features
and they want to describe it in depth.  Or could be just
mistuned text-generator which is spitting text based on some
templates and a database.

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                              Waldek Hebisch