The chaos that you may have experienced this Christmas to get the Nintendo 64 Game System was just a small taste of what’s in the future for embedded controllers burbles an utterly fatuous release from Frost & Sullivan Inc to herald its World Embedded Controller Market. The breathless prose makes it sound as if you’d better rush out and buy that washing machine you want now before the supply of 4-bit microcontrollers that control the wash cycle runs out – whereas the Silicon Graphics Inc-designed 64-bit chip in the Nintendo Co Ltd is the most special of special cases since it is application-specific to the games machine and is a very complex chip with almost nothing in common with the 4-bit microcontrollers that are shelled out like peas. The release also hyperventilates that the 64-bit segment has seen the largest growth, with a compound annual growth rate of 53%, which has to be the surprise of the decade NOT! as the Nintendo 64 is just about the only volume product to use a 64-bit processor, so the only surprise is that the reported growth rate was not a lot higher.
