> unless Intel built a lifetime supply
This is standard practice for low-volume legacy parts. A single production run will often yield enough parts for months or even years of demand; once demand gets low enough, the manufacturer will just sell what's left of the last batch, and discontinue the part when that runs out.
Since they are out of patent, curious if anyone would be willing to manufacture it again.
If there wasn't enough demand ~20 years ago for Intel to continue manufacturing the part, it's far less likely that there's enough demand now to justify designing, manufacturing, and qualifying a new part to replace it.
Wafer.space slots can support around 4-500,000 transistors in 1x1 titles, usually reserved for 1000 dies. The 386 (non SLC version) had 275,000. In theory this could be manufactured at 180nm/130nm https://wafer.space/
But then you would have to redo the whole layout and design of the chip right? Surely you can’t just scale the mask and manufacture the same chip at different scales and everything still works?
Check out the Intel Quark, it was a <50mhz x86 that was resized and re-done on a smaller feature fab and runs on a watch battery (its a bios battery), a full x86 SOC!
I dont know what feats of engineering went into it, it is discontinued, but it is a very tiny x86