Many of those chips are not programmable though, or are 'programmed' through things like voltage dividers.
At what point do you consider a chip a 'computer'? Would something like a voltage regulator or mux/demux count as an ASIC?
At what point do you consider a chip a 'computer'? Would something like a voltage regulator or mux/demux count as an ASIC?
The factory needs to get code on there somehow, and usually the method isn't documented. Oftentimes it's not locked down.
I would consider a switchmode PSU where the main switch FET is driven by a microcontroller running firmware (they can then have an I2C/SPI input to allow programmable voltage control). There are probably dozens of these in any modern computer.
PIC chips are small, they are everywhere, they are very useful for adding complex, software-defined behavior (including DSP) at the circuit component level, and they are full general-purpose CPUs with onboard RAM and programmable ROM.
(Of course, this just moves the problem around; it's not uncommon for a chip revision to break software elsewhere in the system.)
I would say anything that approaches a Turing-complete machine.
IANACS, but I'd say the point at which it becomes capable of running Turing-complete languages. This probably covers anything that has a firmware, save maybe if there exist firmwares programmed in limited languages that can't execute arbitrary computation.