On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:28:25 +1300, you wrote:

>>>From what I learned from the distributors, Freescale knows that
>> they are already far behind Microchip in the 8-bit market and they 
>> are
>> trying very hard to push HC08 and HCS08. Microchip is different,
>> they are far ahead in the 16-bit market so they are pusing dsPIC
>> and PIC24 to achieve their ambitious goal to be a 2 Billion company
>> in the near future.
>>
>> The price is okay. The development tools are in general more
>> expensive but they are catching up though.
>
>
>I have a friend who is reasonably knowledgeable on industry directions 
>and every time I send him any Microchip 'ra ra' material, while he is 
>heavily committed in other areas, he recites the same basic mantra - 
>ie 'ARM is it, the whole world is going to ARM, the future is an ARM 
>future, those who are not already on the ARM bandwagon are in danger 
>of missing the future, ...' .
>
>Thoughts?
>
>(I've BCC'd this to him).
>
>
>        RM

ARM is a great architecture, but will never compete with the lower-end PIC16 parts as they will
always be inherently significantly more expensive due to die area. We will never see a general
purpose 8 pin ARM  - only Smartcards will use low pin-count ARMs
I'm sure you could probably derive a formula based on the ratio of core size to memory size that
would show the optimum core size for given application scale. 

8 bit MCUs will always be cheaper than 16/32 bit where core size is a significant part of the cost.
If a chip has a ton of memory, a 32 bit core won't use much more percentage of the die as a whole if
the majority of the die is the memory. Conversely, if there's only 1K flash, the core is a very
significant part of the die area and so its size is crucial to cost.

An ARM with 1K of flash would be silly. Ditto a PIC16 with 1M...! 

However I can see the higher end PIC18 and MegaAVR end of the market being increasingly under
attack. 

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