Just to keep this down to a couple or three paragraphs ...
{begin rant}
We started prototyping with an ARM7TDMI that ATMEL was having developed by a French design team back in 2001-2002. We bought their VERY costly (>$1000 without LINUX and development tools when everyone else's cost about $200 including LINUX and development tools) eval board, and found that there were a few things they hadn't told us previously. First of all, their bootloader didn't work properly. Secondly, their SDRAM channel didn't work, which meant we really couldn't use their processor. Thirdly, they didn't know the low-level details of quite a bit of their hardware, though they denied that. I could go on ... but the fact is that they lied and stonewalled at every turn, and, French engineers being essentially permanent employees (you can't fire 'em no matter how incompetent they are) they kept on doing that.

We switched to Samsung ... but only after losing considerable time and wasting quite a bit of money.

Oh yes ... there's one more thing ... The ultimately decided, after keeping us on the string by promising fixes in revised silicon, that they wouldn't produce the part we'd been working with for over half a year.

It doesn't matter where you buy an ARM, or any other product, so long as it isn't ATMEL. Use ATMEL, and you get what you deserve.
{end rant}

RE