What embedded CPU choice is a good one these days? There are a few 32-bit designs.. AVR, C28x, ColdFire, CPU32, ETRAX, PowerPC 603e, PowerPC e200, PowerPC e300, M-CORE, MIPS32 M4K, MIPS32 microAptiv MPU, MPC500, PIC, RISC, TLCS-900, TMS320C28x, TriCore, TX19A, etc. And the only VLIW seen in the flesh seems to be the products of Transmeta for an unattractive price. ARM Cortex-M and to some extent the more demanding counterpart ARM Cortex-A with DMA and external memory seems to take over ever more market sections like an viral octopussy. It's in your phone, hdd, photoframe, DSL, printer, switch etc. So it seems to pay to get to know ARM architecture even thoe they enforce their patents a bit too much for my taste. Like on HDL-code to create an ARM processor in FPGA.
I find it fascinating that these single chips have more power than some Amiga machines. They lack the memory on-chip and the graphics accelerator. But in terms of crunch performance they most likely run circles around many Amiga machines.
