[duskwuff]

Even then, there's still some sustaining engineering required to maintain a design and keep it relevant. The (e)Z80s that are being made today aren't the same as the ones that were being built in the 1980s -- they're being extended with new peripherals and ported to modern fabrication technology.

I'm fairly certain that hasn't been happening with the ColdFire series. Every ColdFire part I see listed on NXP's site is from 2010 or earlier, before the Freescale acquisition. This puts a lot of those parts 2/3 or more of their way through their 15-year availability commitment; if NXP intended to keep the line alive, I'd expect to see a lot more new parts, and that isn't evident here.

(MIPS is a weird one to mention because MIPS Technologies actually declared it dead last year and started trying to rebrand themselves as a RISC-V IP core provider. The main niche that architecture was used in was wireless routers, but that's been taken over pretty thoroughly by ARM these days.)

Don't get me wrong -- I cut my teeth on 68k and I loved the architecture. But it's also clear to me that it doesn't have a future.