I have a few problems with that, though. For one, I don't really care about the vast majority of projects that kind of stuff is used for, and for another they often have closed proprietary toolchains.
Defense, agriculture, home automation, industrial automation, finance, automotive, oil&gas, space resarch, robotics. The list goes on!
I think the proprietary toolchain stuff is also changing, but slowly.
Although there's no way past proprietary chips, at least the open-source toolchains for them are coming along.
Yeah, see, that's a hold up for me. If I'm going to go through the effort of building something completely non-commercially viable than I want it to at least be completely open. And before you say anything, no, I'm not at all interested in making anything commercially viable.
And a ARM CortexM0 is about 12k gates, it's hard to get much simpler than that.
Yeah, that's precisely the problem. Though you're right, the M0 at least does fit what I'm talking about pretty well, in-order, no-MMU, etc.
Cortex-M0 is very comparable to a 68k with 32-bit registers. http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....