Paul A. Clayton (paaronclayton.delete@this.gmail.com) on March 7, 2013 7:59 pm wrote:

> The packaging and memory capacity issues seem like they would be easy to solve technically,
> but I could see that targeting high-volume uses (where BGA might be more attractive [guessing,

BGA is not specially attractive for high volume.
BGA is attractive due to size/space constraints and signal integrity.
But it's generally more complicated to design and manufacture with.

>
> With respect to pricing, it is not clear what makes the pricing that much higher. 32-bit processors might
> well be more attractive to certain developers new to microcontrollers, which might allow some premium to be
> charged. I would also guess that the Cortex-M core licenses might decrease in price somewhat over time, but
> I was under the vague impression that such only accounted for a tiny fraction of the product cost--even with
> tight margins in the microcontroller market, such would seem unlikely to account for a 4x difference.

The µC market is vast and has different needs but in general it's very high volume and is *extremely* price and power sensitive.
This leads to the need for vastly different solutions, from dead slow 8 bit multi-cycle processors to much faster 32 bit pipelined processors.
There are also vast differences in the set of integrated memory, peripherals and interfaces each product has.

Put simply, nobody has made a µC which suits David's needs and happens to have a Cortex-M core.