Something using an XMEGA is going to be very un-Arduino like!
Violent agreement! It's an interesting part as an upgrade to the regular AVRs, but probably not for arduino. There's a growth path from Arduino-->other AVR-->ATxmega-->AVR32, or something like that...
Yes, absolutely agree. I am working with the ATXmega128A1 right now, and it is rather nice!
But Arduino occupies a very different niche in the market. We use a number of Arduinos and we will be releasing a board based on Arduino reference designs that has additional interfaces on the main board rather than needing a shield that fits our particular market and needs. But XMEGA-ARDUINO? It would be far too much of a paradigm shift.
Our choice was to use something like the LPC2364 from NXP to get the UARTs and I2C we need, or, fortunately the XMEGA came along at the right time and we can leverage years of ATmega experience. But we also use AVR32, PowerPC and NIOS-II/Altera FPGA based systems. So we had plenty to choose from and we didn't need to add Yet Another Platform to the collection. We need CAN ports too, but we have also been using the MCP2515 from Microchip for some time (they make great peripherals, but not so great CPUs!) so we will add two of those to get the feature mix we need.
The big RAM space is a huge plus for us. Otherwise this design might have gone to a NIOS-II processor where we can get SDRAM interface cheaply.
The Geek