On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Russell McMahon wrote:

> Thoughts?

I am not an analyst but my opinion is that anything that does not scale 
easily to 16-32x its current size, is not second courced and widely 
available, will be a niche within a year or a few. That would be 
anything that uses paging or banking or complicated upgrade paths or is 
a moving target architecture-wise, or has hard-to-get design tools. The 
ARM is an old design with a lot of potential that has now been 
integrated into single chip units. MIPS is in the same class with ARM (a 
little higher usually). What with Internet-enabled water taps and 
curtains this is practically a requirement. Archaic architectures (like 
MCS51) survive by inertia and low cost. Also as the price pressure 
increases, silicon area begins to play a major role and RISC will always 
win out in such contests. ARM and MIPS are RISC.

With the new ethernet chips, the older architectures will have some air 
to breathe, but not for long. The second question a client would ask 
after having squeezed an interactive web server into a PIC would likely 
be 'does it do DHCP and can we manage it via SNMP' ? Or 'can I connect 
it to a DSL modem directly' ? ARM and MIPS can do that sort of thing 
now.

Peter
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