I've read that the 6502 feature size was 6 um, and the die size 21 sq mm. On a modern process with say 45 nm feature size, you could fit about 1000 CPUs on a sq mm.

With a 100 sq mm chip, that would be about 100,000 CPUs.

Of course, without integrated memory and I/O buses, this would be a completely useless exercise.

are you serious? are these numbers correct?

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e2020

Another way to look at it... the 6502 had about 3500 transistors, while the biggest moderns chips have a few billion. Almost a million times as much.

All you have to do is open up an old Apple II or Commodore 64 and compare the chip against a microprocessor like Atmel, Microchip or Parallax. The newer chips are more powerful and much smaller because they use a smaller nanometer process.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computi ... ?p1=A1&a=f

In the future, FPGAs will be able to make hardware changes and not just software changes so you may be able to go to a higher speed and have a different clock for the bus and the screen.