But Ive been looking at this 8051 compatable controller for use in one of my projects
Here ...
http://www.e.kth.se/~e93_daw/vhdl/

Its very fast as it runs at one instruction per clock in a three stage pipeline which makes it suitable for things where you need more mips than your average 8051 which paying lots for it,trouble is the code is utterly foul and looks like it was written by a dyslexic monkey,uses internal tristated busses and has no working multiply or divide unit and it uses a horrible twim internal ram system rather than a dual port ram,oh and the interrupts only kind of work.

Ive written a new multiply/divide unit am sorting out the tristated busses and generally tiding the code up.Ill post it in the hardware library when its done.It might come in handy for someone else but ive no idea where that leaves the copyright.