On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 9:54 AM, Stephen Dubovsky <smdubov...@gmail.com> wrote: > ARM has over 80 licensees for just the Cortex family. Atmel has... only > themselves. If you are going to invest the time & money to setup and > develop for a chip, not just for a current project but unknown future ones, > you will likely be better off starting/switching to ARM.
Of course! You can't just avoid ARM---they crept into everything, from the lowest-lowest end 30-cent Cortex M0s to multi-core 64-bit A53 monsters that compete with Pentiums. I see other companies getting antsy about their proprietary lines, e.g. TI announcing MSP432 which is really an ARM with MSP430-like peripherals---although they have been awfully quiet after announcing it with some fanfare few years ago. I guess the good'ole MSP430 is selling well. Such legacy demand is blessing and a curse to vendors like TI and especially Microchip, who have the amazing zoo of architectures: several 8, 12, 16, 18, 20 and 24-bit PICs, MIPS (disguised as PIC32) and now AVR and an ARM line. I guess they will just keep making them while they have legacy customers---Microchip has a reputation of almost never abandoning existing customers. There's a nice niche for companies like them, or Rochester, who still make the 1980's chips like 9513. By the same token, though, one shouldn't use them in new designs unless there was some compelling technical reason, like an exotic peripheral that only exists on the old chip. Having said that, the current new kid on the block is RISC-V, which actually IS open-sourced: it's an academic project which, however, has some credible industrial partners that are making parts and boards. It'll of course have hard time getting the breadth of software and hardware support that ARM has, but I was impressed what they have been able to achieve so far. Stephen, did you have a look at them? I guess a guy like you would have very little incentive to look for an ARM alternative, but maybe there was something that caught your eye even if you wouldn't plan to adopt it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
