... at least with regard to how ATMEL treats its customers.

In my case, they (ATMEL) took their product off the market because almost nothing aside from the core worked at all. Nevertheless, they denied that their hardware didn't work, even though they ultimately couldn't demonstrate that it worked. They said their software worked fine, which, ultimately, it was shown it didn't ... AND they tried to convince my boss, who, by that point didn't believe them at all, that the reason nothing worked was because I didn't understand the ARM architecture.

Actually, the ARM7TDMI core worked OK, but their bootloader code was faulty, their SDRAM channel didn't work, the chip's on-board FLASH didn't work, their high-speed serial (CODEC) channels didn't work, etc, etc, etc ... Moreover, they freely admitted that their board couldn't work with the 60MHz clock that they'd designed into it, so all the timings had to be scaled down, which defeated their performance claim. We lost a year's time, by the end of which we'd concluded their products couldn't be relied upon at all.

As a consequence, not one of my clients, friends, associates, and few of my competitors, have ever used an ATMEL product in the past decade.

If you find that amusing, it's probably because you've found a product of theirs that does work more or less correctly. I doubt there are very many of them.

RE