> 4MHz may be too slow for the application. They can
> of course increase the clock frequency to 20MHz to be
> 5 times faster. Switching to an AVR may be ok as well
> since the students perhaps have some experiences with
> AVR as well.

20 gets you 5 mips on the pic, but 16 gets you something like 15.5-ish
on the AVR, and without the "w" register bottleneck, pages, memory
holes, etc.  Vectored interrupts are a plus too.
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