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Re:The 8-Bit Era: Eight Iconic Processor Designs – By Babbage by tenebrisalietum on Monday December 04, 2023 @01:45PM (#38521247)
8-bit CPUs have 8 data pins (D0-D7) and anything going in or out of the CPU is doing so 8 bits at a time. This includes all external accesses such as RAM, ROM, and I/O.

But 8-bit CPUs have more than 8 address lines, because 256 bytes total for combined RAM, ROM and I/O space is not useful. That number I think is typically 16 although Signetics 2650 had only 12 (with the instruction set only supporting 12-bit addresses), and the Atari 6507 (6502 derivative) had 13 (instruction set still supporting 16-bit addresses but the upper 3 bits of addresses were basically ignored).

> Is it just a matter of replacing all instructions/chips/buses to be 32 bit/lane?

Depends on the 8-bit CPU really.

- The Z80 lets you combine specific register pairs to work with 16 bits and address memory through them.

- The 6502 does not, but has the whole "zero page" thing where the first 256 bytes of RAM can contain 16-bit data and pointers.

- Both the Z80 and 6502 have a stack pointer register (the 6502's being 8-bit and fixed to point to RAM locations 512-767). But the 2650 had an internal 8-byte stack and stack pointer.

- The 8051 (and the 8048 I think) has lots of instructions for manipulating individual bits in registers and RAM, and also has a division between the memory that opcodes are fetched from versus data. None of the above work like that (the F8 might).

Re:The 8-Bit Era: Eight Iconic Processor Designs – By Babbage by rodlette on Monday December 04, 2023 @03:13PM (#38522436)
Wow. If anything, working around 8 bit's limitations seems to make 32 bit look simpler in comparison.
Re:The 8-Bit Era: Eight Iconic Processor Designs – By Babbage by huseyinkilic on Tuesday December 05, 2023 @12:41AM (#38527505)
The 6502's stack is hardwired to $0100-$01FF (256-511).
Re:The 8-Bit Era: Eight Iconic Processor Designs – By Babbage by ngcc_hk on Tuesday December 05, 2023 @06:11AM (#38529454)
And much slower cf zero page. Hence we are told not to use stack as far as we can.
Re:The 8-Bit Era: Eight Iconic Processor Designs – By Babbage by kjs3 on Thursday December 07, 2023 @05:20PM (#38562637)
I recall the Signetics 2650 as having 15-bit internal addressing with the 16th bit used for an indirect addressing mode. But yes, not all 15 bits being routed out to pins it had pretty limited memory potential.