Embedded world is weird. Changing hardware design is difficult and costly by itself and manufacture process is limited by real world constraints, therefore the

Embedded world is weird. Changing hardware design is difficult and costly by itself and manufacture process is limited by real world constraints, therefore the largest "part of why you would pick chip A over chip B" is availability, both long-term and short-term: will I be able to source the chip in 5 years? how easy it would be to change delivery schedule if my manufacture schedule changes?. Oh, and ARM looks like a solution until you have to battery operate it. Cost of the software in embedded systems is quite often low compared to hardware costs. I ballpark lower limit for part cost at $10. I ballpark software development cost at $100k/y or $50/h. Let's say it is reasonable to get software done in a man-year. At 1M units of projected sales, software cost is at 1% of hardware cost (not project cost). At such ballpark estimate software engineers' opinion is only treated as a humble request. Of course this varies from project to project. Increasing portion of embedded systems are mostly software. Portion of projects have hard-realtime requirements. Here software engineers are benevolent dictators. But that is by no means a general case.