The xMegas, while announced in Feb 2008, have only appeared at distributors within the last couple of months (and only SOME of the announced parts.) HW designers are being ... cautious.
There have been previous discussions; it's also not clear how many of the xMega features would "fit" within the Arduino environment. Faster clock and more RAM is nice, but DMA is ... hard to simplify.
I was a bit annoyed to see that the 100pin xMega chips are not at all compatible with the 100pin Mega chips. It would have been nice to plop an xMega onto the MEGA board and double the clock speed/etc, but it can't be done
The xMegas, while announced in Feb 2008, have only appeared at distributors within the last couple of months (and only SOME of the announced parts.) HW designers are being ... cautious.
Getting samples of anything from Atmel has been a nightmare the last couple of months. I'm still waiting for samples of the Xmegas I requested in March
I was a bit annoyed to see that the 100pin xMega chips are not at all compatible with the 100pin Mega chips. It would have been nice to plop an xMega onto the MEGA board and double the clock speed/etc, but it can't be done Sad
That is annoying and I think Atmel have missed a great opportunity to get the Xmegas quickly into the market by not making them compatible. But that said, there are some nice 48 and 64-pin devices in the Xmega family.