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Intel Core 2 - Yorkfield, 45 nm process technology, Number of Transistors: 820 Million

MOS 6502, Number of Transistors: 3510

So in theory, a chip with 65536 MOS 6502 cores each with 64K of internal RAM (4Mb cache) could be made.

Sure, if you completely ignore all of the extra circuitry for the on-chip network and cache coherency and everything else you would need. Transistor density is far from the limiting factor in the number of cores we can wedge into a single system.

If you assume that there is no cache (only on-die memory) and that memory is not shared between cores, things become much simpler and scale more linearly. Core-to-core communications and plenty of other details remain to spend man-years ironing out, but it seems like it would be possible to approach 64k cores or at least 16k.

Might be able to peel out the BCD stuff from the 6502 to free up a little additional space and approach communication between cores kinda like the "handshake bus" GreenArrays chips use: http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB003-100822-...

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