6502 was about 0.02 DMIPS/MHz. Example 8051. Original had ~50K transistors, about 30K in cpu core. 50K transistors = ~17-25K NMOS gates. Performance was ~0.009

6502 was about 0.02 DMIPS/MHz. Example 8051. Original had ~50K transistors, about 30K in cpu core. 50K transistors = ~17-25K NMOS gates. Performance was ~0.0095 Dmips/MHz, 12 steps per clock (microcode). Current state of the art is http://www.dcd.pl/ipcores/56/ http://www.dcd.pl/ipcores/56/ fast DQ80251 13K/20K gates (cpu core/whole microcontroller), 0.70579 Dmips/MHz = 75 times faster per mhz. can be clocked >300MHz when implementted in asic. small DT8051 5600 gates = ~12-17K transistors in NMOS(of course nobody does that anymore) ~23-34K transistors in CMOS, 0.0763 Dmips/MHz = 8 times faster per mhz. can be clocked >200MHz when implementted in asic. But this is legacy inefficient design. ARM laughts at it with M0 at 12K gates and >1 Dmips/MHz at 1/10 the power. Cortex-M4 at 65K gates reaches 1.9 Dmips/MHz