TI CC2640 Vs nRF51822 for BLE product design

[Lakerno]

I am trying to choose a BLE device for my upcoming biomedical product design. Any help in comparing these 2 devices will be greatly appreciated.

Things I am concerned about are

1. overall cost( including development costs, compiler costs + all other costs)
2. development support(I am a newbie designer, i need all the development support in PCB design + BLE stack modification etc) 3)Community support 4)Reference designs etc. 5)Chip power consumption. (i can see this from data sheets, but do I need to know anything more) 6)Anything else is important?

Anyone compared these 2 chipsets? Thank you!

[Lakerno]

I just realized that nRF51822 has a cortex m0 , while cc2640 has a cortex m3. Does anyone know, if nordic is coming up with an integrated cortex m3 + BLE device? Thank you!

[Clem Taylor]

The cc2640 is an interesting part. It has the Cortex-M3 as the main processor and the radio sub-system has an integrated Cortex-M0. So they can offload all the real-time BLE stuff to the Cortex-M0 without waking up the Cortex-M3. I'd imagine that the upcoming nRF52 will have a similar multi-core design.

They also bolted on some sort of proprietary RISC processor for low power monitoring task. If they were being sane they would just use another Cortex-M0, but I'd this is IP from some other project and transistors are cheap.

The RF core has only has 4KB of SRAM and a chunk of ROM. I'm not really a fan of chips like this that use ROM for core functionality. ROM is fine for a bootloader as long as it is simple and heavily constrained but it often sucks for something like BLE.

The odd thing is the part only has 128K of flash which could easily be a limiting factor for many applications.

[SRA]

1 year later - I'm looking at this same CC2650 vs nRF52... I have the advantage of knowing now exactly what the nRF52 now is but...

You were mostly right. The TI does cost more, and the 128kb is too limiting for my application. The nRF52 didn't go to separate core, but that's slightly offset by the fact that unlike the TI, the nRF52 is upgradable.

I figured an update would be helpful for someone in case they also find their way here.