What constitutes a core?
I was using a high speed bipolar process at the end of the 80's and found a design for 16bit processor that used either 600 gates (or was it (cmos) transistors). I re-modelled it using the bipolar process and it would have been the fastest cpu in the world at the time (we could do 2.4GHz with ease then). Couldn't find any RAM for it thou...