One of the fun tasks I get to do, is teaching short courses on various
     technical subjects to engineers here at SA.  You guessed it - I'm
     doing a short course on the PIC.  I would like to include a quick
     comparison to competing "low end" microcontrollers (AD2100, 8051,
     6805, 6811).  I'm thinking about a fairly quick and unscientific gross
     comparison and not a detailed engineering analysis.  I'd love to hear
     any comments and gut impressions y'all might have ("what? engineers
     with opinions about different processors?").  Here are some short
     notes I have (please, throw rocks at these statements).

     - PIC's one cycle 120ns instruction is pretty fast, especially when
     compared with 8051.  (however, aren't their accelerated 8051
     look-a-likes that *are* as fast as PIC?)
     - Availability (especially through DIGIKEY) is much better than rivals
     like, say, Motorola...
     - If one counted up the numbers of steps to program a PIC at one's
     desk (and $$$) versus the others, the PIC would win...(one could argue
     "so what?" but this is nice for prototyping, at least.
     - PICs prices are pretty competitive (2100s around $10 (?), but 8051s
     can be gotten pretty cheap, right?)
     - My use of PICs has been for very low-end stuff where assembler was
     completely adequete.  My gut feeling is that when you start
     contemplating larger C programs, 68HC11s start looking much more
     manageable.  Maybe new higher-end PICs can dispute this reaction.

     Thanks!

     Thomas.Coonan@Sciatl.com  (Scientific Atlanta, that is)