On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, Chen Xiao Fan wrote:

> famous in the MCU market at all, they are actually within
> the top 10 in the 8-bit market. They are not famous because
> their major market is in Asia only (especially the greater
> China area) where cost is of the utmost importance.

Speaking of cost, I think that the x86 frenezy will cool down very fast 
when the real price war will start and silicon area will begin to 
matter. The ARM6 core has something like 35,000 transistors. That's 
about a fiftieth of a Pentium afaik (Pentium at 60MHz already had 3.1 
million transistors, even 386dx had 275,000), and it runs on 1 Watt at 
233 MHz (that is part of the reason why).

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_microprocessors

The Z80 was a 'niche' but it appeared in a lot of products that were 
mass manufactured. The Nintentdo game boy and Sharp calculators come to 
mind here. It is interesting to note that the GBA uses an ARM cpu 
instead of the Z80 used by its predecessor.

According to Wikipedia ARM holds 75% of the embedded (32 bit) market 
now.

Note that Intel's XScale is ARM. 1GHz clock ARMs are available from 
Intel.

Peter
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