On Sun, 2 Apr 2006, Russell McMahon wrote:

>> The first one of many ... but $1 is the price for 1k probably. However,
>> imho, once these things start rolling, byebye 8 bitters, 16 bitters,
>> it's been nice to meet you, etc. With those parameters it is competitive
>> with MCS51 compatible low cost cores, and about 20 times faster. And
>> this is just the first of many.
>
> BUT the power consumption is high and technology dependant. Until some magic 
> sub-micron low power process arrives the low power market will not be taken 
> over by ARM.

I am not so sure. A zero clock ARM core was announced in 2005 ? That's a 
completely event driven CPU. The transistor count is everything, given 
same technology and clock used.

Here is an interesting article on this:

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:viTGsLkHmVQJ:www.ece.uah.edu/~milenka/docs/milenkovic_mse03.pdf+number+of+transistors+pic+core+microchip&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3

PIC 18F core in 100k gates FPGA uses 78% of the array but implemented 
with dual data paths (= 4 times faster than PIC but less complex). I 
don't think that the basic ARM core needs 100k gates.

Peter
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