[FirmwareBurner]

>chips like the 6502 have still been in active use (almost 50 years now)

Also 8051 cores can still be found in modern products

[pclmulqdq]

8051s are just now getting phased out as control cores of IP blocks, which is pretty wild.

The 32-bit ARM and RISC-V cores are small enough and easier to program.

[Kirby64]

ARM vs 8051 is a licensing fee thing usually. 8051 license terms are extremely generous compared to ARM as far as I know. RISC is a being explored more readily, but toolchains are not nearly as robust as arm/8051.

[RetroTechie]

Just a few years back, I checked out datasheet for an IC encountered in an USB card reader (newly bought).

Turns out a 8051 core was included (iirc clocked @ ~30 MHz, to control jobs like light busy LED on card read/write ops, some bus arbitration / priority settings, power management or the like).

Made total sense to encounter an ancient, 'fast', tiny 8-bit core there, even though unexpected.

There must be (and will be) an endless list of products including tiny CPU cores like that (eg., RFID tags come to mind).

[oynqr]

Ah yes, the three essential building blocks of electronics: NAND, NOR, 8051.