Microchip to Acquire Atmel for $3.56B

While Atmel MCUs are nice and robust (especially avr-gcc and avr-libc are great advantages) they seen like quite high cost. Cheaper ARMs probably are eating their lunch.

Meanwhile, I've never been friends with the microchip Dev tools. Clunky, expensive, proprietary. Here's hoping we'll get AVR ergonomics and PIC economics...

But it might be too late to matter. Cortex-M0 eats the low end, M4 the mid end, and the phone SoCs the high end. (Even Intel may be threatened at some point... Different business though)

Atmel was a sleepy, ran-with company until they had a hit with the tiny and mega series. They were a fresh architecture, ample peripherals, great documentation and open. Who could have anticipated the Arduino's success? Their transition past 8-bit was lackluster due to poor peripherals, poor documentation and unimpressive performance.

They were on the ropes when the cortex cores delivered the coup de grace. I'm not sure they were worth even this much. So long, Atmel. It's been a slice.

Well there still is a case for the AVR -- you get zero pipelining effects, no flash latency etc; it's like a tiny, slow, scalar CPLD for all intent and purpose.

Cortex can't beat that, you can tight loop an AVR to cycle precision and get pretty cool return for your running frequency; the Cortex are nowhere as linear. [0]

Altho, I agree that the bigger parts are useless... xmegas and such have absolutely no reason to exist IMO.

On the other hand the CM3 and especially M4's are awesome beast; and the parts like the STM32's are just peerless in terms of features -- they are just borderline scary.

On the other hand, I was worried a little while back that there was nothing between these trusted 8 bits cores and the ARMs -- but nowadays there is; Espressif esp8266 is pretty cool, but the next one in the pipeline is awesome [1]; 2 (well 3 but) cores, and more peripherals than you can shake a stick at. Thats the first SoC that for me can give the STM32 (and NXP equivalent) a good run for their money (and win, in my opinion).

Dislaimer: [0] I know the AVR very well, I'm the author of simavr: http://github.com/buserror/simavr -- [1] I'm also one of the beta tester for the ESP31/32 new chipset.

> The low end is something like the PIC 10F family, when compared to the Cortex-M0 its about a tenth the cost and a fiftieth the power consumed

I don't really believe either of those claims. At 1ku quantity on Digikey (which admittedly is not the cheapest vendor) cheapest Cortex-M0 chips cost $0.378 and low-power chips (NXP KL03) start from $0.504. That aforementioned KL03 is advertised to run at 50 µA/MHz.

Meanwhile cheapest PIC costs $0.35 and is rated 175µA at 4 MHz, which equals to 43.75 µA/MHz. Of course the power consumption figures are not directly comparable, and something like µA/MIPS might be better metric anyways. But based on this there is no way PIC is anywhere near fifty times more power efficient or ten times cheaper.

RIP Atmel Studios...

I can only imagine how this is going to affect choosing a microcontroller in the future. When I was in school, PIC vs AVR was often debated. I also really liked the selection of ARM Cortex-M parts that Atmel offered. I can only hope that the good parts of Atmel remain into the future.