I am looking for system on a chip capability for my device.
Products from freescale, STMicroelectronics and Toshiba fit the bill and I realized that I could add other functionality to the basic board design at minimal cost.

The ATOM is just a CPU and for this reason, was eliminated from my CPU selection process.

While I agree that an X86 instruction set is desirable from a Windows or Mac OS perspective, Intel’s ATOM is to late to market. As you point out, there is no compelling Windows operating system to run on handhelds. I will stick with proven Wind River Linux and ARM Jazelle model as the OS and development environment.

With billions of ARM chips shipped and featured for about every process controller or consumer electronic device you can think off, Intel will never gain ARM’s economies of scale and diversity of on chip functionality nor the multitude of competing vendors to force the price down.

Apple’s acquisition of PA Semiconductor – an ARM design shop is a strong sign of future of Apple’s platform architectures. The issue for Apple is to decide if it should migrate to ARM Cortex for all products and drop Intel or to continue support legacy Motorola, Intel and Samsung ARM architectures.

The name of the game now is microelectronics whose ever falling cost will make them more and more ubiquitous in the home and offices of the near future. ARM will continue to be richly rewarded for being the chip design of choice.

Regards
Jim Collier
Toronto