probability of comment ARM and 51

The point was not so much about death, but rather picking a horse that has more time to run, and a higher probability of providing employment moving forward.

Concerning the 30-year lineage, you also have to consider the number of engineers skilled in the art with whom you might wish to compete, many of whom will cling to 8-bit even when lower power and better solutions might exist. There are clearly places for 8-bit micros, and PIC's and the like, but the choices are significantly wider, and processors are becoming an increasingly fractional part of an SoC solution. Take most any Cortex-M3 solution, the RAM and FLASH transistors dwarf those used in the core, often by several orders of magnitude.

The point was not so much about death, but rather picking a horse that has more time to run, and a higher probability of providing employment moving forward.

Concerning the 30-year lineage, you also have to consider the number of engineers skilled in the art with whom you might wish to compete, many of whom will cling to 8-bit even when lower power and better solutions might exist. There are clearly places for 8-bit micros, and PIC's and the like, but the choices are significantly wider, and processors are becoming an increasingly fractional part of an SoC solution. Take most any Cortex-M3 solution, the RAM and FLASH transistors dwarf those used in the core, often by several orders of magnitude.