probability of comment ARM and 51

The future is clearly not 30 year old 8-bit processors, the relevance of learning 80x51 for a career in embedded development is pretty limited.
Isn't it amazing that when new chips where a specific application ( e.g. motor control) is integrated, you often see the micro being the '51 architecture.
There are still 4-bit processors sold in volume.

Assembler skills certainly have some portability, although if 30 year old tech is your thing the 68000 from 1979 would have been a lot better as a near ideal architecture with an orthogonal instruction set.
but are VERY useful in debugging. And who gives a $#!^ about portability in embedded.

Your phone, tablet, pc are not using 8051, or equivalent devices, beyond things like keyboards, or CD/DVD drives. Even then only to do housekeeping tasks, controlling custom hw/logic to do the real work.
you are missing that a very high percentage of embedded apps are far less complicated.

The amount of questions about the 8051 here relate to poor teaching and comprehension of the topic rather than real-world utilization.
and so are the majority of the ARM queastions.

No, I am not saying that the '51 is more important than the ARM but the reports of the death of the '51 have been severely exaggerated. (paraphrasing Mark Twain)

Erik

The future is clearly not 30 year old 8-bit processors, the relevance of learning 80x51 for a career in embedded development is pretty limited.
Isn't it amazing that when new chips where a specific application ( e.g. motor control) is integrated, you often see the micro being the '51 architecture.
There are still 4-bit processors sold in volume.

Assembler skills certainly have some portability, although if 30 year old tech is your thing the 68000 from 1979 would have been a lot better as a near ideal architecture with an orthogonal instruction set.
but are VERY useful in debugging. And who gives a $#!^ about portability in embedded.

Your phone, tablet, pc are not using 8051, or equivalent devices, beyond things like keyboards, or CD/DVD drives. Even then only to do housekeeping tasks, controlling custom hw/logic to do the real work.
you are missing that a very high percentage of embedded apps are far less complicated.

The amount of questions about the 8051 here relate to poor teaching and comprehension of the topic rather than real-world utilization.
and so are the majority of the ARM queastions.

No, I am not saying that the '51 is more important than the ARM but the reports of the death of the '51 have been severely exaggerated. (paraphrasing Mark Twain)

Erik

The point was not so much about death, but rather picking a horse that has more time to run, and a higher probability of providing employment moving forward.

Concerning the 30-year lineage, you also have to consider the number of engineers skilled in the art with whom you might wish to compete, many of whom will cling to 8-bit even when lower power and better solutions might exist. There are clearly places for 8-bit micros, and PIC's and the like, but the choices are significantly wider, and processors are becoming an increasingly fractional part of an SoC solution. Take most any Cortex-M3 solution, the RAM and FLASH transistors dwarf those used in the core, often by several orders of magnitude.