[egdeltur]

You could still buy Z80's until last year. The Z80 was first manufactured in 1976. It was in continuous manufacturing for about half a century. Third-party drop-in clones are still available.

The 430/530 used a Samsung RISC CPU that's no longer made.

But most of Garmin's modern gear uses ARM Cortex family processors, which have been around since the 1990s and are still manufactured in large volumes today. ARM CPUs are in Raspberry Pis, a lot of embedded systems, most Android phones, and they form the base architecture for Apple Silicon processors. There's probably one in your coffee machine. Your car probably has 100 of them embedded in epoxy blobs, sensors, electric window controllers, the ECU, and gawd only knows what else.

(I haven't pulled apart my G3X Touch to try to identify the CPU type

TL;DR: 10 year old CPUs for embedded applications are completely normal across the industry.

- mark

Fair points! The compute is OMAP 4460: https://vansairforce.net/threads/g4x-connecting-the-dots.241376/post-1921942

You're that embedded has a longer lifespan but ARM spreads the gamut from true embedded like IOT to Apple SoCs and the world changes (and EoLs) faster with coprocessors including graphics.

The g3x is more cell phone and other 4460 apps are mobile devices that are all EoL. TI ended OMAP dev work so costs and dev complexity increase significantly.

 

[egdeltur]

Agree 100%. Saving 20% on modern processors means nothing compared to the cost to redesign and recode integrated systems, not to mention the cost of abandoning customers and forcing upgrades. Some industries, like smart phones have a market desiring that, but far from common.

Possibly true pre-COVID but value of code is going to 0 and these chipsets are no longer produced.