IMHO, there has to be someplace where advocacy and support for 8-bit MCU's, specifically the 805x family, is the specific focus. First of all, this is because the 805x is so different in many respects from "other" MCU's, and, secondly, because there are so many sites supporting those "other" MCU's that are of so much lower quality and, particularly, focus.

Most tasks can easily be handled with nearly any MCU. Some, however, can be handled much more elegantly with one rather than another. When the elegant solution is with 805x, I believe it should be discussed on this 805x-targeted site rather than simply becoming part of the difficult-to-parse noise, where it is simply lost.

There are ARM-specific, PIC-specific, and AVR-specific discussion groups. There should be an 805x-specific one as well, simply to show the user community how much life there still is in the old workhorse. There are clearly areas of overlap, but ... if you can do it with an old familiar core, why not do that. There are still a few things I've been waiting for nearly a decade to see on 8052.COM, yet haven't encountered 'em. These can be implemented with ARM, PIC, or AVR, and, in some cases, have, indeed been described. Because more and more of the tasks assigned to MCU's are being written in 'C', the true advantage of the 805x instruction set is being masked out of sight, but it's still there.

There are things that some 805x-core chips can do more elegantly than other MCU's, and that, IMHO, should be the focus of the majority of discussions appearing here, rather than arguments about which MCU is "better" in the general sense. If, eventually, it turns out that some other MCU actually turns out to be superior, it will supplant the 805x soon enough. I don't think that ignoring the strengths the 805x core and its instruction set offers by broadening the discussion is likely to serve the embedded controller community as much as some people believe.

RE