Hacker News Reader

;-)

Why do you think so?

ARM has notoriously low energy dissipation due to low voltage.

Cortex-m0 wouldn't be utterly insane, but yeah. An avr or pic or z80 would fit better :)

I used to agree, but there's now extraordinarily cheap cortex-m0 chips available too.

E.g. Freescale Cortex M0 for $1.09 in singles: http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/MKL03Z8VFG4/MKL03Z8V...

Cheapest AVR (ATTiny4 for $1.36) http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/ATTINY4-TSHR/ATTINY4...

Cheapest PIC (PIC10F200 for $0.60) http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/PIC10F200T-I%2FOT/PI...

They're all at least in the same order of magnitude. And in my experience, arm-none-eabi-gcc is a way nicer development experience than MPLab or AVR Studio. avr-gcc is decent once you get it set up properly.

Right, but how hot does it get? I like my toast brown and crisp.

Hah, I have only once managed to get one hot, but its ability to simultaneously execute code was seriously compromised!

Agreed. An IBM POWER8 seems to be optimal for that. You may even end up mining a bitcoin if you set it to dark.