Who needs so much MIPs ?

Due to high MCU integration, today we have very complex SoC (System on Chip) MCU products, that have all peripherals included, you need to build complete high end systems, which are more and more be in demand today.
Sometimes it is only the need to implement a printer support, that leads to a MCU, that must contain a USB host port functionality.
To realise cost effective solutions, our customers ask for very high integrated 32-bit ARM products, that have all typical peripherals like USB Host, USB device or Ethernet on chip. Additional companion chips would increase PCB memory demand and cost and would make operating system integration more complex.
ATMEL has a growing roadmap of ARM9 products, that fulfil these demands.
All ARM9 have built in MMU, data and instruction caches as well as SDRAM interfaces and JTAG debug support.

The world of ATMELs ARM9 MCUs

Based on ARM920T thumb core, the AT91RM9200is the first and very popular platform for Linux, MSC Windows WinCE.NET ® or INTEGRITY RTOS ® from Greenhills. This 200 MIPs processor has USB2.0 speed host and device ports, Ethernet MAC10/100, Flash card interfaces, SDRAM- burst flash interface, SPI, I²C, I²S, AC97, four USARTS with IrDa, ISO7816 smart card protocol, RS485 support, RTC and time division multiplex (TDM).

All AT91 products have peripheral DMA (PDC),that realises hardware driven data transfer without CPU intervention. Reference and developing board is AT91RM9200-EK which is the best starting point for first Linux or WinCe.NET® experiences.