A combination of missing features and odd memory access limited its appeal, and the system saw little use in the market.

In 1972, Signetics' Jack Curtis[a] hired John Kessler of IBM to lead the design of a new single-chip CPU intended to compete with minicomputer systems.

[2] While Kessler designed the architecture, Kent Andreas laid out the CPU using a recently developed ion implantation NMOS process.

In contrast to the far more common PMOS process of the era, NMOS used less power and dissipated less heat.

[2] In March 1976, Signetics reached a second-source agreement with Advanced Memory Systems (AMS).

At that time, most CPU firms were very small and no one would buy a design from a company that might go bankrupt.

[2] Signetics tried again with National Semiconductor in 1977, who planned to introduce versions in the last quarter of the year.

For unknown reasons, this appears to have never happened, and only a single example of an NS version, from France, has ever been found.

The 2650A was a reworked version of the original layout intended to improve yield, and thus reduce cost.

As such, the 2650 has a number of features that were common on 1960s minicomputers, but rarely found on newly designed microprocessors of the 1970s.

This avoids the need to write a centralized interrupt handler that reads additional data from the bus, determines which device driver is being invoked and then calls it; the 2650 can jump directly to the correct code, potentially stored on the device itself.

These bits controlled functions like whether the address should be post-incremented or pre-decremented, which is extremely useful for constructing loops.

When the 2650 was designed in 1972, these limitations on address space were not significant due to the small size and high cost of the static RAM memory typically used with these processors.

An on-die stack is much faster, as the data can be accessed directly without waiting for it to be read from external memory, but it also takes up room on the die and is always limited in size as a result of practical tradeoffs.

These factors led to its use by a number of hobbyists in many countries such as Australia, U.S.A.,[8] United Kingdom, the Netherlands[9] and Germany.

The second group of consoles were based on the Signetics 2637 as a video display controller; Emerson Arcadia 2001 which was released in 1982 and which used a Signetics 2650 running at 0.895 MHz as a CPU belong to this group together with many other ones software-compatible (Leonardo, Hanimex MPT-03 etc.).

Italian game manufacturer Zaccaria released 28 pinball machines based on the 2650 CPU.

The 2650 was also used in some large items of equipment such as the Tektronix 8540, a microprocessor software development system which supported various in-circuit emulator, trace memory and logic analyser cards for real-time debugging of microprocessor systems, as practiced in the 1980s.

The processor was most suited as a microcontroller, due to its extensive I/O support: For a short time starting 1979, Philips sold a modular 2650 computer called the 'IMS' – Industrial Microcomputer System,[12] based on the Eurocard format in a 19" rack.

It included CPU, PROM, RAM, input, output and teletype modules.

For development, they later added DEBUG, DISPLAY, INTERRUPT and MODEST ((E)PROM programmer) modules.