On 26/01/2010 22:43, Ken Seefried wrote:
I've looked into this a bit.
:-) You've saved me some work there!
As noted previously, it is essentially impossible to
figure out exact
shipments of 8051 [...]
If you wave your hand and say the average volume price
across all 8051 variants is US$0.25 (a number I think is probably
high), that's around 40 billion units shipped in 2007.
I must admit that's more than I thought... more than 100 million a day.
According the Annual Report for ARM Holdings, Plc.,
there were
shipped 2.6 billion ARM processors for mobile applications and 1.4
billion in other applications from all licenses in 2008. This was up
from around 3 billion units in 2007 (in a total market for 32-bit
embedded processors of around US$3.8B).
So that's roughly 1/10 of the 8051 units, and I'm forced to concede I
was wrong about ARM being most prolific.
By comparison, Freescale did around US$1.88B in
microcontroller
sales, but that was across all their lines (including the still very
popular 68xx/HC lines), so is safe to assume the actual units shipped
for PPC is a fraction of ARM numbers. I know there are other PPC
licensees, but I don't think they're going to make up that gap.
All analysts agree that the 8-bit market is eroding and the 32-bit
world is exploding, from a market share if not revenue perspective.
There's an awful lot of 32-bit parts in things that don't really need
that sort of grunt. I'm reminded of a colleague who told me his friend
was working on fuses for explosives -- building PICs into the detonators.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York