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How do you choose an ARM family

How do I go about picking an architecture ? My first thoughts suggested Cortex M3 but the more I look into it the less sure I am.

Obviously I don't to go to the trouble of learning a new technology only to find that I've made a bad processor choice (ie nearly end of line). I've spent many hours looking at many websites and have yet to find any high-level stuff on choosing my first ARM device.

If there's one thing wrong with ARM its the almost infinite number of devices

I'm an embedded developer wanting to undertake my first ARM project, so I'm completely new to the ARM architecture. I want a low power device with serial, USB and some ADC channels.

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  • I want a low power device with serial, USB and some ADC channels.

    I think those are the requirements you should focus on (repeating others' remearks here.) Not the 'ARM family.'
    What's an 'ARM family' anyway? Is it the CPU core? ARM7TDMI is among the most popular in general-purpose MCU's. Cortex M3 is emerging as the new leader. Whatever you pick, you'll still program in C (most likely.)
    I've had an experience of transitioning from an ARM7TDMI-based MCU to Coldfire V2. The latter is big-endian as opposed to the little-endian ARM7TDMI. To my surprise, it wasn't painful at all. As long as you write in well-styled C, you won't have problems running your code on any 32-bit CPU.
    For every new architecture, things like startup code and device drivers have to be written. That's something to keep in mind. Apart from that, I don't think the choice of a CPU family is that critical.

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  • I want a low power device with serial, USB and some ADC channels.

    I think those are the requirements you should focus on (repeating others' remearks here.) Not the 'ARM family.'
    What's an 'ARM family' anyway? Is it the CPU core? ARM7TDMI is among the most popular in general-purpose MCU's. Cortex M3 is emerging as the new leader. Whatever you pick, you'll still program in C (most likely.)
    I've had an experience of transitioning from an ARM7TDMI-based MCU to Coldfire V2. The latter is big-endian as opposed to the little-endian ARM7TDMI. To my surprise, it wasn't painful at all. As long as you write in well-styled C, you won't have problems running your code on any 32-bit CPU.
    For every new architecture, things like startup code and device drivers have to be written. That's something to keep in mind. Apart from that, I don't think the choice of a CPU family is that critical.

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