[gamble]

The Cortex-M3 microcontrollers are awesome. Much more powerful than the older 8-bit architectures available at the same price, and amenable to industry-standard tools instead of just the compilers and IDE sold by the manufacturer. I think this move just mirrors the general industry trend toward the ARM architecture. It's become difficult to justify using one of the old 8-bit architectures anymore, except at the lowest extremes of price or power consumption.