ARM is ruling the world, it is everywhere. So why is it that we still have PIC and Arduino among others around. I think they all should be extinct by now and people should only be learning and doing ARMs in Universities as well as workplace. Am I wrong?
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You could say this about many technologies: Why do we still have Apple Macintosh when Microsoft Windows clearly has the greater market share? Why do we still have fax machines? But that's an unfair comparison: PIC and Arduino fill certain niches whereas fax machines are clearly antiques. :) – JYelton Jun 09 '14 at 19:01
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5-1 for saying that Arduino is a microcontroller and incidentally for the question's ambiguity. – Dzarda Jun 09 '14 at 19:02
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1Standby power consumption of even a cortex M0 is higher than that of small PICs. Also, engineers are conservative about software and not keen on switching toolchains. – pjc50 Jun 09 '14 at 19:21
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@quantum231 [This thread](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/q/37423/7036) has some insight on how people choose microcontroller family. – Nick Alexeev Jun 09 '14 at 19:59
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1If this is not a deliberate trolling attempt you should consider a career switch. What does "rule the world" mean when in the next sentence you state that other things still exist? A wise man observes his surroundings and learns from it, instead of complaining that it does not conform to his expectations. – Wouter van Ooijen Jun 10 '14 at 18:26
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Yup you're wrong :). But really, a university's job is to teach students foundations so that they can build whatever they want on top of that foundation. No school should be pushing a particular solution. The main reason they do is because some corporation gave them a bunch of free stuff.
ARM has its place in the world. PIC's are cheap and have a wide following in the embedded world as does TI as well as other manufacturers. It's all about the balance between feature set and cost for the particular application.
Arduino's have their place for those who want to be able to prototype with minimal investment and knowledge.
horta
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@markt Does ARM have products at the very low-end though in the 8-bit arena? – horta Jun 10 '14 at 14:50
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Several Cortex M0 low-end products exist is the ~ $0.50 region (check for instance LPC81*), but are not exactly equivalent to let's say a PIC10F200. – Wouter van Ooijen Jun 10 '14 at 18:23
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@WoutervanOoijen Very nice. I'm impressed that Arm's made it down into that space. – horta Jun 10 '14 at 18:58
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My background has been with PIC18's. We've built fairly complicated products with these "simple" microcontrollers.
Now, I'm designing something around an ARM Cortex M3. I am amazed at how much more powerful they are, both in the core functionality and in the peripherals available. However, the ARM learning curve is much steeper, and there is some learning to do before you can even make an LED blink :)
Since a PIC is more than capable for many projects, and easier to learn, I don't see them going away.
Of course, I just noticed that that a STM32F105 is actually cheaper than an ATmega1281 (!!). I'll probably be using ARMs in the future...
bitsmack
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Similar story for me. Despite well over 10 years with PIC's, mostly PIC18's, I've recently stepped away from using a PIC24 for my postgrad studies because it didn't have enough grunt (and an optimized toolchain wasn't free). STM32F4 + Coocox + ARM-GCC to the rescue... – markt Jun 10 '14 at 09:41
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