[kabdib]

My housemate and I used to joke about CPUs someday being so cheap that they would "fall out of cereal boxes as the prize."

The STM8, a chip about 5X more powerful than the first computer I owned, has a variant that is under 17 cents in quantity. Doesn't quite qualify as mommy-buy-me-that-cereal prize material, but it's damn close.

The number of 8-bit CPUs sold every year must dwarf the number of 32-bit ones, yes?

[kjs3]

If found it a bit difficult to get accurate sales numbers of how all 32-bit embedded processors compare to all 8-bit embedded processors. However, there are still tens of billions of Intel 8051 (introduced in 1980) derived processors/cores/IP shipped every year, so it's safe to assume the whole market is still vast.

[alexvoica]

I can tell you that ARM and MIPS ship about 5bn 32-bit MCUs per year combined. I can't give you a statistic for 8- or 16-bit MCUs though.

[kjs3]

Yeah...I get the same handwavey number for ARM & MIPS; its a crazy successful market. And it's clear that 32-bit is the future, for some value of future.

That said, trying just to understand how many 8051 derivatives is almost impossible. There are many dozens of vendors who supply chips, cores & other embedded IP, many of whom don't even call it 8051 any more. There's probably a few tens of them within 100 feet of you. Much less the 20 or so other significant 8-bit families.

It's a shame that hard data is only available from high dollar market research firms, but I suppose they did the legwork and deserve something for the work.