[antonyme]

The core is simple, small, cheap or even free, requires few resources, has plenty of tool support, is well-understood and well-documented, and is easy to debug and deploy. The 8051 is perfectly sufficient for many simple embedded applications that only require an 8-bit micro.

It's the instruction set that has been retained, not the silicon design. The variants these days are more power-efficient and powerful in terms of MIPS and peripherals, and have indeed benefited from years of R&D.

[tambourine_man]

But is a ISA that wasn’t designed for embedded really that well suited for it?

And if the silicon design is new, we are not benefiting all the much from decades of battle testing, right?

I can’t imagine how a clean, embedded first 32bit ISA design wouldn’t be more appropriate.

[zokier]

> But is a ISA that wasn’t designed for embedded really that well suited for it?

But 8051 was designed for embedded:

> The Intel MCS-51 (commonly termed 8051) is a single chip microcontroller (MCU) series developed by Intel in 1980 for use in embedded systems

(wikipedia)

> I can’t imagine how a clean, embedded first 32bit ISA design wouldn’t be more appropriate

I guess we'll see how riscv will develop.

[tambourine_man]

Ah, I didn’t know that. I thought it was a repurposed chip. That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

[mjw1007]

The 8051 was always designed for "embedded". It's a microcontroller. The ISA is nothing like the 8080's.

[Taniwha]

Yes but it's a bitch to program, multiple memory hierarchies and address spaces (at least 3), only one index register (hard to move stuff), and enough variants that "8051" is more of a species definition than of a particular architecture

(disclaimer: I sell an 8051 based product, have sold them in the past - never again)

[andrewshadura]

It was designed for embedded use.