> 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.

So that would be everything?

AFAIK no ARM chip is realy second-sourced in the sense that you can buy
the same chip from a second manufacturer.

> 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.

One of my favourite books from 30y ago was a book about microcontrollers
from Adam Osbourne (the one that later made the Osbourne I). It
contained a prediction about the future of microntrollers, which boiled
down to: There will be a split between the higher part of the marked,
where nice-architecture chips will dominate, and a lower part where even
the weirdest architecture can survive if the price is right. I think
this still holds, and there are a few more important things like inertia
and availability track record.

> 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.

That will indeed be the questions for the higher segment of the market.
For the lower segment the questions will be 'what does it cost at
100k/y' and 'can I be sure that I can buy that chip 10y from now'.

Wouter van Ooijen

-- -------------------------------------------
Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: www.voti.nl
consultancy, development, PICmicro products
docent Hogeschool van Utrecht: www.voti.nl/hvu
 

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