[dailykoder]

> 6502 cores are still found in some SoCs aimed at the ultra-low-cost high-volume market.

What's the reason behind that? Probably just keeping existing, working designs and thus saving R&D costs? Sounds like beating a 10 cent risc-v core would be hard.

Edit: When I first read your comment I had to chuckle a bit, because I got the image of a multicore SoC with 6502 6502 cores. That would be a fun project for my FPGA hmmmmmmmm ...

[themoonisachees]

10c per part is incredibly high depending on how low-cost we're talking.

If your chip needs very basic processing, and you're going to sell it for less than a cent per chip, you need your core to be basically free.

Sure RISC-V is very inexpensive, but for parts like these risc is massive overkill and as a modern core, you'll be spending a lot of die area on a core that should really be an ASIC, but designing an ASIC is expensive so you can just slap a 6502 in that bad boy and call it a day.

On the other end of the scale, you'd be surprised to learn that many chips you don't ever interface with as a user contain even ARM cores. These are usually ASICs in high-end products.

[snvzz]

>but for parts like these risc is massive overkill

You seem to underestimate how small a RISC-V core can be.

Take a look at SERV.

[monocasa]

The area of just the register file (even for rv32e) is higher area than the survivors of the 8 bit ucontrollers.

[userbinator]

16 registers * 32 bits * 4 transistors / cell = 2k transistors just for storing the bits alone, and that's not including the decoding and read/write circuitry.

[snvzz]

There is no need to do weird math, as we know the actual numbers.

6502 has 3510 transistors. SERV at CMOS occupies 2.1kGE.

SERV is smaller than 6502.

[monocasa]

Gate Elements are multiple transistors.

And that count doesn't include SERV's register file.

[snvzz]

Not true for SERV vs 6502.

SERV is smaller.

[irdc]

There’s also the cost of rewriting (yes, from assembler) all the existing code. And don’t forget QA.

[jeffgreco]

Go on!

[utensil4778]

A lot of cheap USB1/2 widgets are actually a 6800 core. It's crazy how these old CPUs have stuck around for so long