If your compiler supports the 615, it's worth looking at. My 1st go-round with this one was
a batch of serial motor control ICs for a customer. Very cool little controllers. We use them
for our 8-pin encoder/decoder ICs now. They're nicely priced even in small qty.

PIC24 are also nice, but I'm not really fond of the Mchip 16-bit C compiler. dsPIC I've never
had a need for. I can do pretty much everything we're asked for with a 14-bit core & PBP
or C.

What I really like about PBP is the open library. If you're into the heavy end, you may want
to look at PBP. It's worth the price of the compiler just for the library.

Back in the old days when I used the 8051 core, I would have paid ten times the cost of
PBP for a similar 51 core library.