Rod Pemberton wrote:

Ho hum, another Usenet poster bloviating about which CPUs
have the most commercial success while mentioning only
bit players who have a tiny share of the total market.

x86, ARM, PIC, and even the mighty 8051 are niche products
compared to microcontrollers made by by GeneralPlus/SunPlus,
Elan/EMC, WinBond, Sonix, etc. This is an entire world
that is invisible to you unless you are a designer of
talking Barbie dolls, computer mice, or musical greeting
cards. In this world, nearly 100%% of the software is
written in highly optimized assembly language with Forth
-- and AFAICT only Forth -- making some small inroads.

Guy Macon wrote:

My optical Dell computer mouse (costs 10 Euro, when buying as additional
equipment with a PC) has a CY7C63813, even in DIP case. Arrow has the SOIC
version for $2.94 for single units. It has 8k flash and 256 bytes RAM. With
an optimizing C compiler I think it should be possible to implement a mouse
device for it in C. The M8C instruction set is more powerful than 8051, but
the core is slow. But doesn't matter for many applications.

On Jul 20, 2:04 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote:

Don't worry about this guy. He either didn't understand what I was
asking about or has seem some other oddball stuff that he is confusing
with what I said. Either way I think he just needs to hear more about
this and I think he will see that I am not asking for anything really
"out there" (except maybe the using Forth stuff... ;^).

On Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:04:08 +0000, Guy Macon <http://www.GuyMacon.com/>
wrote:

I thought ARM was the most popular processor in the world.
Over 3 billion produced last year IIRC.

"rickman" gmail.com> wrote in message
news:2cb802ae-0c71-4136-ba2d-9c6e661fde77@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

Sorry that I confused you... My post only covered things I thought you
didn't mention in your original post:

1) I asked about scale of your project: personal one-off cpu, small
specialty run, or commercial
2) I asked why an existing solution wouldn't work: cost, complexity, or
specialization, etc.
3) I mentioned a few possible non-FPGA, cpu solutions: older, modern, or
specialty
4) I mentioned some simple cpu design options - which you weren't
interested in...

Good luck,

"Guy Macon" <http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote in message
news:IuOdnT22kuct4x7VRVn_vwA@giganews.com...

What era? And, which market? The 6502 was a large commercial success
during it's era. It was the cheapest and most powerful chip of it's time.
The x86 is a large continuing commercial success in the PC market with
95-99%% market share per year. The ARM (and someone else had to update me on
this fairly recently...) is a very large commercial success in the embedded
market (cellphones, PDA's, etc.).

"Stan Barr" wrote in message
news:slrng874pe.cjq.t-bone@citadel.metropolis.local...

I didn't...

Can I ask that you guy discuss this somewhere else. I find it very
common that when I start a thread in C.L.F it often gets hijacked to
discuss something of a personal nature and not on topic.

I understand how discussions migrate as they evolve, but this is going
to make it very hard for me to find with wheat in the chaff (if there
is any).

How about starting a new thread to discuss single chip MCUs?

Rick

On Jul 21, 5:41 am, "Rod Pemberton" wrote:

rickman wrote:

Rod Pemberton wrote:

Right. I should have been clear that I was responding to comments
about x86s and ARMs, not uCs that run Forth directly.

It isn't the 8 years that are a problem. My last consulting job
in the toy industry was a couple of months ago. The problem is
that someone working at Mattel only knows how many uCs Mattel
buys, not the worldwide market.