>I did an in depth comparison between the PIC16F876/877 and the
>AT90S8535/somethingorother for a project about 18 months ago.
>They were very close but I chose the PIC because I didn't need to
>shell out for new development tools. At the time my conclusions
>were that the PIC has as little lower power consumption
>(considering clock/instruction ratios) and that the PIC had a more
>generous amount of Flash (8K words vs 4K words).
With the Atmel parts, the power consumption comparison varies a LOT
depending on whether you run at 3 or 5V. Atmels really gobble power at
5V, but get more sensible at 3V.=20

A couple of things I would add :  that AVR is way better for
interrupt-intensive apps as it has seperate vectors for each source,
and you can reserve registers for use by int code for fast context
switching.=20
PICs generally have beefier output drive, especially on the high side,
and the eeprom is more reliable - with Atmels you absolutely must use
good brownout protection, otherwise you can trash the eeprom at
powerdown even when not accessing it.

In many apps there's little to choose between them - I default to PICs
as they're what I'm used to.
=20

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