Study of Microprocessors

Most often the courses prescribed at these technical universities use one particular microprocessor product.  8085 from Intel has been a very common example used to illustrate the microprocessors for the students. However, that is not a very appropriate one. It is so very old! Besides, it took some design shortcuts due to the packaging available (and the number of pins available on them). Thus, the architecture is unlike any classical processor and has the strange arrangements like the multiplexed address bus.It often complicates the understanding unnecessarily.

What I feel should happen is introduce a common template for the study. This template would fit most of the processors available and there are many available! The teacher then can introduce the details with reference to any particular processor and explain how it operates in each of the specific areas. For example, one could start with a high level description of how any processor integrates with rest of the hardware to work as a processor system together. One could then get into the bus and its details, how it integrates with memory system, how it works with the I/O system, instruction set and so on. More than one example should be looked into so that students get a very good feel of the tool that is being used just about anywhere! What do you think?