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One of the big things about Ben Eater's kits is that all the parts he uses in his videos are still in production. Other CPUs from that era are super interestin
by Teknoman117 5y ago
One of the big things about Ben Eater's kits is that all the parts he uses in his videos are still in production.
Other CPUs from that era are super interesting (Motorola 6800, 6809, the 68000, etc., Intel 8086, etc.), but they are no longer produced, so building systems requires sourcing new-old-stock or e-waste pulls from places like eBay, AliExpress, utsource, and so on. Eventually there will be no more of them.
I believe the only CPUs from that era still being manufactured are modern CMOS variants of the Z80, 6502, and 65816. Their clock rates are 10-20x what they were in the late 70's / early 80's.
- krallja 5y ago68K’s are still produced by Rochester Electronics; they are still used in some embedded systems (allegedly automotive systems?), which is good news for kit builders!
- Teknoman117 5y agoI'd never bumped into them before, interesting. Are you referring to this: https://www.rocelec.com/news/motorola-6800 https://www.rocelec.com/news/motorola-6800 ?
- krallja 5y agoI was talking about the 68k, not the 6.8k, but that’s very exciting news to me! Love it when a vintage chip reenters production.
- Teknoman117 5y agoThe tail end of that article mentions the 68000 based products. Unfortunately looking up the part numbers for the reproduced ones on digikey has them marked as obsolete.