After Cypress dropped their bid for Atmel, and Atmel spurned Dialog, I thought that Intel might swoop in. Intel has been making noise about getting back into the embedded market, where they once had a huge presence with the 8051 product line (and before that the 804x line. They finally gave up on the idea of the x86 architecture in embedded.
All these M&As of companies doing embedded stuff and Intel is left out.
I think I'll go do a COP8 design.