Is it just me, or would this seem like a pretty big assumption on ARM's part?

I haven't used ARM before but I did a quick search through Digikey and what I saw is: 1) The ARM parts all look to be much bigger. The smallest I could find was a 48-pin device and most of them looked to be 144+. I don't see anything that competes with low pin-count 8051s. 2) The price of low-end ARM parts look to to be on the high end of most 8051 derivatives. 3) The speed of ARM parts looks to start in the neighborhood of 33MHz and goes up to 200+ MHz. Great for speed, but how does that effect power consumption? I haven't seen a datasheet yet but I'd expect the higher speed also implies more power consumption.

All of this seems to me to mean that it's going to take more than buying an 8051 compiler company to motivate people to switch to ARM. As has been said many times, you need to choose the right microcontroller for the job. And while I haven't spent a huge amount of time researching ARM, the limited observations above would suggest to me that ARM isn't always the right choice (though I may be wrong... as I said, I haven't used ARM before and my observations are based only on what I saw available at Digikey and there certainly are ARM parts that Digikey doesn't carry).

Plus like I said before, if Keil were to stop supporting 8051 you still have IAR and Raisonance that would see a huge windfall as 8051 clients move to their products. Unless ARM is planning on buying IAR and Raisonance as well, buying Keil alone isn't enough to sink the 8051 architecture.

IMHO.

Regards,
Craig Steiner