Craig,

Have you looked at the "canned" ARM-board solutions? Samsung, Crystal, and Micrel have all got some pretty fancy low-cost (<$200) eval boards that do a number of things very well, including supporting the external FLASH and external SDRAM that a substantial OS, e.g. the vendor-provided LINUX, requires. If you want to consider this line of thought, plz contact me via email, and I'll share some details.

Most of these boards could be produced for about $40 in low production volume, and probably less if you don't want all the features.

The advantage of the GNU tools seems to be a compelling reason for people to use these, by now, high-production devices. The Micrel part is an ARM9 with a switch fabric including PHY's on-chip, AND a separate PHY, so you have security. This saves lots of $$$ on external PHY chips.

RE