It was a hybrid processor, 16 on the inside 8 bit on the bus. From Wikipedia.
The Motorola 6809 ("sixty-eight-oh-nine") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code, and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.
adrian_b 1 hours ago [-]
Motorola 6809 was a great improvement over Zilog Z80 (previously the best "8-bit" processor), but unfortunately it was introduced too late, in 1979, when the transition towards 16-bit CPUs able to address more than 64 kB of memory had already started.
Motorola had made the mistake of introducing at the same time 2 different incompatible ISAs, one for CPUs covering the low-end of the market, MC6809, and one for CPUs covering the high-end of the market, MC68000. This mistake has cost them the chance of being selected for the IBM PC (because MC68000 was considered too expensive, while MC6809 was not future-proof, with its limited addressing space). After they have seen the success of Intel with its 2 software-compatible CPUs, 8086 for the high end and 8088 for the low end, Motorola has also introduced MC68008, a MC68000 variant for cheaper computers, but it was too late, as the IBM PC became dominant.
Mountain_Skies 6 minutes ago [-]
It also kept the HCF, Halt and Catch Fire, opcode.
pklausler 4 hours ago [-]
I think of the 6809 as a 16-bit microprocessor, myself (pace Wikipedia). It has 16-bit registers, load/stores, and add/subtracts. A nice clean architecture for its day.
spogbiper 3 hours ago [-]
I learned assembly on the 6809 and enjoyed it quite a bit. Much nicer than x86, which pretty much convinced me never to do assembly again
RandomTeaParty 2 hours ago [-]
"Board games" here means go (and only it?)
I honestly was hoping for some tabletop eurogames or smth...
actionfromafar 1 hours ago [-]
... 8-bit microprocessor launched by Motorola in 1978
...reached a playing strength on par with GNU Go
adrian_b 45 minutes ago [-]
MC6809 was actually launched in 1979, like MC68000, about one year after the launch of 8086 in 1978 by Intel.
What Motorola did in 1978 was to publish some articles in the specialized magazines, announcing MC6809 as the future better replacement for their existing MC6800 derivatives. This is the same like Intel describing during last year how great will be their Panther Lake CPU, but Panther Lake has really been launched only a couple of days ago.
Rendered at 20:13:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The Motorola 6809 ("sixty-eight-oh-nine") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code, and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.
Motorola had made the mistake of introducing at the same time 2 different incompatible ISAs, one for CPUs covering the low-end of the market, MC6809, and one for CPUs covering the high-end of the market, MC68000. This mistake has cost them the chance of being selected for the IBM PC (because MC68000 was considered too expensive, while MC6809 was not future-proof, with its limited addressing space). After they have seen the success of Intel with its 2 software-compatible CPUs, 8086 for the high end and 8088 for the low end, Motorola has also introduced MC68008, a MC68000 variant for cheaper computers, but it was too late, as the IBM PC became dominant.
I honestly was hoping for some tabletop eurogames or smth...
...reached a playing strength on par with GNU Go
What Motorola did in 1978 was to publish some articles in the specialized magazines, announcing MC6809 as the future better replacement for their existing MC6800 derivatives. This is the same like Intel describing during last year how great will be their Panther Lake CPU, but Panther Lake has really been launched only a couple of days ago.