MCU selection guide
A brief overview of MCU manufacturers and their products.
Atmel
BeagleBoard
Freescale
8-bit S08
16-bit S12
32-bit Qorivva (Power arch), Kinetis (ARM), ColdFire
Widely used in industrial applications
Mostly expensive dev boards, although there are some exceptions
LeafLabs Maple
ARM Cortex, many pins…
USD50

no experience yet
Microchip
NXP Semiconductors
32-bit ARM Cortex-M{0,3,4}, ARM7 , ARM9
Good support in Linux
Dev boards:
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mbed - overpriced prototyping board based on NXP LPC1768 ARM Cortex M3 with an onboard ethernet controller and online IDE
Parallax
STMicroelectronics
Texas Instruments
16-bit MSP430
32-bit Stellaris (ARM Cortex-M), Sitara (ARM Cortex-A), Hercules (ARM Cortex, safety critical applications)
Mediocre Linux support
Dev boards: