It seems like any serious endeavor on this front would focus on arm-m0 , risc-v, and Xtensa ESP cores. Those are the ones that can be recovered by the billions. You can recover tens of 1980s era level computers out of most any consumer device these days, even lightbulbs often have one.
For $0.1 I can buy an MCU that can bit bang a keyboard , mouse, sound, VGA, with 2x the memory and 96 times the processing power as my old 6502 based computer. An esp32 is much, much more capable, like better than an old pentium machine and has wifi, usb, Bluetooth, etc…. And costs 0.7-2$ on a module. They can be found in home automation lightbulbs, among other things.
Espressos has shipped over a billion esp32 chips since the platform launched.
Sure, we should have a 6502 based solution, as it has a lot of software out there and a minimal transistor count, making it possible to hand-build. But for a long time we will be digging up esp32s and they are much more useful.
For $0.1 I can buy an MCU that can bit bang a keyboard , mouse, sound, VGA, with 2x the memory and 96 times the processing power as my old 6502 based computer. An esp32 is much, much more capable, like better than an old pentium machine and has wifi, usb, Bluetooth, etc…. And costs 0.7-2$ on a module. They can be found in home automation lightbulbs, among other things.
Espressos has shipped over a billion esp32 chips since the platform launched.
Sure, we should have a 6502 based solution, as it has a lot of software out there and a minimal transistor count, making it possible to hand-build. But for a long time we will be digging up esp32s and they are much more useful.