... is that you "sound" like a marketeer from ARM rather than an implementor.

You stick with the generalities. It's hard not to do that, but ...

My last, hopefully, contact with ARM was with a manufacturer who had apparently hired a consultant to manage his ARM product design, and didn't even know the precise timing of his own memory interface. Since that particular device was in full production, yet he couldn't tell me whether a particular event occurred before or after a particular clock edge, I have to say that something was wrong.

I took a quick look at the cost of licensing the core and building our own device, but the cost was totally ridiculous, at least from our standpoint, where we'd only be producing about 10k units annually.

I haven't ignored ARM core products, but since this is 8052.COM, I've not gotten into discussions about ARM products, and probably won't.

I will say this, however. The ARM EVK's with which I've dealt almost always have cost a very reasonable sum and have included all the tools, thanks to LINUX, required to develop an application. I like being able to use native tools rather than cross-compilers/assemblers/debuggers. Unlike my experiences in earlier generations of hardware, I haven't found many EVK's that supported general development. Most often, developing firmware that used the specifics of one chip made it hard to develop code that didn't ... not impossible, perhaps, but certainly less than optimal.

RE