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Comment by harigov | Hacker News Reader

I believe some consolidation helps them reduce costs and improve efficiency. I guess every market consolidates into two to three big players eventually.

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It's already at 2-3 big players. Further consolidation gets us closer to monopoly tactics. Let's just say tech consolidation is usually bad for the consumer. I see no reason that two, neck-to-neck competitors becoming one company will help us in long-term. We've benefited from those costs and product efficiency was great so far.

I'm sure their costs and efficiency will improve. As usual. ;)

What is the 3rd player right now? AFAIK it's PIC or Atmel. I guess there are the various ARM boards but those tend to be more powerful than little 8 bit things.

TI still makes MSP430s.

As well as a variety of ARM microcontrollers, including the confusingly named MSP432:

http://www.ti.com/tool/MSP-EXP432P401R

Texas Instruments maybe?

It's in the article...

ST Microelectronics has a line of microcontrollers that are (largely) compatible with the Atmel AVR instruction set.

Never heard of those. Do you have a link?

http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN184...

They advertise Arduino compatibility, so I'm assuming that means compatibility with the AVR instruction set, but I could be wrong about that.

Thank you.

But that's just Arduino, i.e. high level compatibility. You have a setup() and a loop() and the same way to do I/O, but not the same underlying instruction set.

The chips on these guys are regular ARM cortex uCs.

They might be just barely fast enough to do real-time emulation of the AVR INSNs though ;)

Renesas is a huge microcontroller supplier that no one ever hears about for some reason.

Other major competitors are NXP/Freescale, ST, TI, and Infineon.

I literally just posted that and deleted it in a comment. It had something else that was inaccurate. I was about to repost it just saying Renesas had SOC's, SuperH chips, and their on fab then saw you comment. :)

On the upside. Less companies means fewer platforms and less fragmentation for developers to worry about.

Developers routinely rely on this fragmentation for more options in the feature set vs. price product space. Such a merger will most certainly lead to some edge case configurations go missing. Lowered prices may be the only actual upside - if it materializes in the light of shrinking competition.

Exactly. This market demands that to find the right fit for a product and best value in performance/IO/watts/dollars. More options is always good for us. Anyone wanting to learn less can stick to one product family.

Less companies means less wooing for end users and thus - a general quality drop in the long run.

Atmel's and Microchip's architectures are so different that I wouldn't expect any consolidation of platforms.

Nah, there are lots of markets that have natural incentives against monopolies. For example, classic web hosting type things will probably never consolidate for a number of reasons ranging from the size and difficulty of the configuration space to being unable to retool when new technology comes along and new players enter.

Chip design and manufacture, however, I can easily believe converge toward a monopoly, mostly because research efforts compound like crazy.

And NRE costs. Lets not forget that. More consolidation every node.

Right, chip fabrication pipelines. Your lithography setup costs $15B, but once you have it set up you can manufacture anything. Ouch.

That's true for fabs but I was talking HW development. Mainly, the EDA tools and the masks. It's why some companies can specialize in offering USB or whatever on certain nodes. It's just that expensive to develop something like that.

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