Ok, I am going to go against the grain here of what most people are saying. Rather than name some newer CPU, I am going to go back a bit.
The PPC 750 (And all its variants).
When the PPC750 was first launched in '97 It was a big step forward. It was the first chip that made a Laptop a viable mobile platform. It had very little power draw (3-8W depending on version), but was also quite fast for its time.
The 750FX was one of the first chips to use an SOI process, and consumed only 4W at 800MHz. Which was significantly lower than x86 based chips of the era. IBM still manufactures 750 chips which are used by more devices than you might think.
As a second chip, the Motorola 68000. While the chip was not the first 16/32 bit processor released, it became extremely popular and was used by numerous companies. Variants of this are still used today, over 30 years later. My personally favorite variant was the '040, which was one of the first CPU's with an on board FPU (For a long time MMU's and FPU's were add-on chips, and not integral to the CPU).
The PPC 750 (And all its variants).
When the PPC750 was first launched in '97 It was a big step forward. It was the first chip that made a Laptop a viable mobile platform. It had very little power draw (3-8W depending on version), but was also quite fast for its time.
The 750FX was one of the first chips to use an SOI process, and consumed only 4W at 800MHz. Which was significantly lower than x86 based chips of the era. IBM still manufactures 750 chips which are used by more devices than you might think.
As a second chip, the Motorola 68000. While the chip was not the first 16/32 bit processor released, it became extremely popular and was used by numerous companies. Variants of this are still used today, over 30 years later. My personally favorite variant was the '040, which was one of the first CPU's with an on board FPU (For a long time MMU's and FPU's were add-on chips, and not integral to the CPU).