If you're writing in C then 8kb is really quite a lot for many applications. The ATMEGA168P in the last-generation Arduino Duemilanove only had 1kb of RAM, and

If you're writing in C then 8kb is really quite a lot for many applications. The ATMEGA168P in the last-generation Arduino Duemilanove only had 1kb of RAM, and the ATMEGA328 in the current generation has 2kb. The attiny2313 only has 128 -bytes- of RAM! Even the Arduino environment actually uses more RAM than you'd consume just using plain avr-gcc, but AFAIK for most applications that's not an issue. The amount of flash (for code & static data) seems to be a more common concern in many cases. When you start managing dynamic runtime data structures, like in a VM or a full-blown operating system, then you really need the extra RAM. If you don't need it, then you're having it at the expense of cost, power consumption & (at the extreme end) size. That said, if you could buy an 8-bit AVR with 64kb of RAM then I would have bought it by now, just to play with Python. :P