The Arduino Zero, not only for hobbyists

At Maker Faire in San Mateo Arduino and Atmel announced the Arduino Zero, powered by an Atmel ARM Cortex-M0+ based microcontroller.

The Arduino Zero is a great tool for prototyping, hobbyists and makers that need more power than what is offered by the AVR based origianl Arduino  boards like the UNO and LEONARDO, but want to stay with a smaller simpler  microcontroller than the Cortex-M3 used on the Arduino DUE. Using a highly integrated device like the SAM D21 in the Arduino environment is great for rapid prototyping, but not necessarily for the professional user working on her application.

What some people don't see right away is that the Arduino Zero is also a good tool for non-Arduino developers. The SAM D21 is fully supported by openOCD and GDB and the on board debugger is CMSIS DAP compliant, so you can use the board in ARM supported toolchain. With this you can easily write the code in any style you like and leverage not only the attractive price and the on board debugger, but also the wast amount of extension boards available to the Arduino platform.

Hackaday has a nice writeup on their pages Arduino Zero Hardware is Not Just for Beginners