I too am often surprised at how often people reach for an Atmel 8 bit AVR chip rather than an ARM. It is a testament to the momentum that Atmel built, the avr-freaks community and the amazing cost effectiveness of it all.<p>But now we&#x27;re seeing ARM chips with built in clocks, and fewer base components required and I think the end of that AVR dominance is on the horizon. And that is why Dialog is buying Atmel[1].<p>Getting started with ARM is easy with one of ST&#x27;s Nucleo boards (which are kinda Arduino Shield compatible, the biggest issue I have hit is that i2c at 3.3v is an issue on some boards). Their Discovery boards are even more capable but can be a bit more work to breadboard with.<p>Once ARM put out a supported GCC on launchpad.net it really made it easy to get a development environment up (no more crosstool or other package for building a cross compiler).<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;dialog-buying-atmel&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;dialog-buying-atmel&#x2F;</a>