BobHoward posted:

Let's talk about a couple interesting Intel ISAs which are not x86!

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The first is incredibly popular, yet also obscure if you aren't in certain segments of industry: MCS-51 aka 8051.

It was a family of 8-bit microcontrollers which Intel originally developed and sold in the 1980s. For its time, Intel did a lot of things right with the 8051, and it won big. They got designed into everything. Intel even licensed it widely, which only increased its reach and popularity. I would guess that most 8051 cores in existence weren't made by Intel.

It is somehow still with us today. An example I happen to know about is that the chips in many USB3-to-SATA devices (drive docks, enclosures, etc) contain a simple USB-SATA data bridge controlled by an 8051, which both directs dataflow and translates USB Mass Storage Class commands to SATA commands.

However, it is slowly but surely fading away. 8051 is this weird old architecture from an era when µCs were almost exclusively programmed with assembly code. It's losing design wins to architectures like the embedded profiles of RISC-V and ARM, which have much bigger and livelier software dev ecosystems. (Those USB-SATA bridge chips I mentioned? The newest gen chips from the same company have gone over to Cortex-M0.)