>Today I think it is a profitable research area to look into manufacturing techniques that might let a colony of 15,000 martians be largely self-sufficient in that this research could pay off here on Earth.

I don't know how they will be able to manufacture CPUs on Mars, I'm guessing 8-bit CPUs will be more possible than modern day CPUs. I think even Motorola 68K will still require advanced manufacturing equipment to transport to manufacture.

I guess with close to 50 years of CPU design knowledge they would be able to design a decent 8-bit CPU with 16-bit address space. Maybe they would use first 512 bytes as a data/code cache to speed up certain calculations (trig functions) (Not a EE, studying Mechanical). Although there is a lot of code available for Z80, 6502, 8080 CPUs.