[tluyben2]

When getting into a project, I usually work with someone in the hardware design space (I can do larger electronics myself and thus prototypes, but I'm hired for very small circuit projects) and after creating a prototype, we usually start searching for the the cheapest MCU (and other components) that fit the project. Spending a lot of time doing assembly and making it fit the constrained memory will pay off when doing million factory runs. A lot of MCU's I work with are faster (or only marginally slower) than my beloved Z80 I grew up with an programmed many years, but usually have less (sometimes far less) memory. I have not worked with kilohertz since the early 80s but he, if it fits (it almost never does) I am all for the lowest priced and power friendly MCUs I can find.

[stevekemp]

It's funny but I've been driving a Z80 with an arduino-mega recently, and I actually timed it for the first time a couple of days ago. I'm getting 6000 clock-cycles a second. 6Khz, rather than that 6Mhz it would be cable of running standalone.

[kristianp]

Why is it so slow?

[stevekemp]

Mostly because I'm doing a lot of manual work reading/writing to the address/data-bus and there is some overhead in the code I've got for emulating RAM & I/O code.

It should be faster, and could be if I reworked it. But I'm mostly using the arduino as a crutch right now until I get hooked up to real driving circuitry so I'm not overly concerned.

[azinman2]

Any consideration as to why a chip might be cheaper (e.g. worst labor practices, worse environmental practices, etc)?

[coupdejarnac]

I'm going to hazard a guess that a lot of these cheapo microcontrollers have cores, uh, not developed in-house.