the money they would have spent on commercial compilers. use GCC as they need hundreds of seats, and make internal training justify the time spent vs. On the other hand, big companies like Siemens, Nokia, Infineon etc. Our observations are that GCC is used mostly in Eastern Europe and in universities around the world, while in the Western world paying EUR 4000 for a commercial compiler justifies the time spent on the GCC learning curve. Navigating through the mentioned learning curve, however, can take quite a lot of time. Once the learning curve has been navigated, you can do everything the commercial compilers can do and more.
The trade off is that GCC has zillions of switches and options for the compilation, which may confuse beginners, and a 1500 pages user manual that nobody usually reads. GCC is the most powerful compiler for ARM, able to compile 1GB of sources for Linux without any problems it's doubtful any commercial compilers would do this job.
There are ARM chips in TV sets, video players and even smaller devices like keyboards and computer mice.
Variations of the ARM architecture are produced by a number of reputable vendors: Allwiner, Analog Devices, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, OKI, NXP, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments and many others (Intel, Freescale, Samsung, Sharp, Hynix, etc.), and are found in today's most popular consumer technology devices including the iPhone and most of the Android devices. The prices of 32-bit ARM devices are now close to their 8-bit counterparts, while providing much more power and many more peripherals than any of the 8-bit microcontrollers. The ARM market is one of the fastest growing microcontroller markets in the embedded world. The ARM microcontrollers are high-performance, 16/32-bit RISC-core devices.