That's why I said "many". It also got very little in the way of speedups from these changes.

Additionally, the manufactures compilers are often setup inside crappy IDEs with integrated debuggers. IAR was included with at least the middle chip he's talking about. The people doing this aren't necessarily the type of folks who use vim + gcc + unix command line stuff to get them onto the boards.

Why do they do this instead of using gcc? No clue. Probably they think they can make more money or are afraid of china stealing their silicon (seriously).