Damn, I miss BB10.
Embedded systems of critical importance
Benjamin Nelson
Evan Collins
Unlike consumers, industries need real reasons to abandon things
Isaac Harris
They have newer versions of Z80 with some improvements (and also clocked higher). Actually even in 1995 you could get a 16 MHz Z80, which was in fact used as the CPU in the Amstrad PCW16. But now they make them much faster still.
en.wikipedia.org
Jonathan Rogers
Totally serious, remember just how tiny those old CPUs were:
en.wikipedia.org
Notice the ancient 8-bit chips were barely a few thousand transistors, whereas even the simplest modern CPUs are tens or hundreds of times that. Quite often, all that's needed is just any CPU power at all, the less of your transistor budget needed the better.
Also, keep in mind most embedded CPUs aren't even on their own dice, but exist only as a tiny SIP core sandwiched between external interfaces, caches, and offload ASICs, elsewhere on the floorplan fabbed at modern feature sizes on modern processes.