>I was told by a distributor at the last company I worked at (about a year
>ago)
>that the two highest selling CPU's (and their derivatives) are the 6502 and
>Z80.
I believe that. If you count the Z-8, Z-180 and derivatives the Z-80 is
probably king of the hill by itself even. I think the 6502 is mostly used
as a core now-a-days though. I couldn't tell you the last time I saw just a
plain "6502" in something. I don't think I've *ever* seen one in surface
mount.
>A lot of microwaves, TVs, cheap phones, toys, etc. Still use the Z80 and
>6502
>simply because they're so damn cheap in high quantity. These consumer
>items
>can easily account for 10 to 100's of millions of CPUs per year!
Oh, easy... We shipped over a million a year just a year ago-- every
Rockwell ('er, Conexant now) modem (about 60% of the market) is just a
couple of 6502's on some serious speed. (56MHz was the last one we used I
think.) If you count Super Nintendos (2 per), modems (~50 million alone),
and VCR's with Winbond or Mitsubishi controllers... 6502 city!
Actually... A Rockwell (dammit... Conexant!) C2800, C2900, or C3900 are all
modem controller IC's, but they're really just super-6502's. Bankswitched
memory, a hardware multiplier, some new instructions...
>The same guy told me that WDC supposedly has a VHDL core for the 6502 that
>runs in excess of 150mhz. Would that be fast enough? ;^)
Probably not... ;-) You'd have to add a bunch of zero-wait on-chip RAM to
copy the code into to keep from being bogged down by memory waits. (That was
a big problem with the C3900 and the like-- a 56MHz 6502 needs data pretty
quick. We ran with 45ns FlashROM and still had external wait-states. Our
snazzy modems [SupraSonic] copied everything into 12ns SRAM and ran with no
external wait cycles to get better compression on the V.42bis engine.)
-Clay
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Received on Thu Feb 3 22:26:11 2000
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