What's the connection you had in mind between the 6502 and the PowerPC? As far as I know they're geneologically unrelated. The 6502 was descended from the 6800

What's the connection you had in mind between the 6502 and the PowerPC? As far as I know they're geneologically unrelated. The 6502 was descended from the 6800 - one of a few ur-microprocessors - and somewhat clumsily evolved into the 65816 before its brilliant but highly specialized design (hard to target for HLLs and which fundamentally assumed memory could be accessed roughly as fast as the CPU was running) couldn't keep up with the times. As far as I know that's pretty much it for its branch of the CPU family tree. Meanwhile - and I admittedly know less about this - as I understand it the PowerPC is ultimately descended from the IBM 801, which was a high-end workstation and server chip. There might've been some influence from Motorola, and Motorola made the 6800 - the 6502's father - so in that sense the 6502 and the PowerPC might be very distant cousins. Still, that's pretty tenuous. My understanding is that the original ARM team was directly inspired by the 6502 - so if its legacy lives on anywhere, maybe it's there.