Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond

On Wed, 1 May 2024 00:09:28 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

 
(Interesting that the microprocessor world made byte addressing--and
ASCII character encoding--universal right from the beginning.
Starting from a clean slate, I guess.)
 

It depends on what you call "microprocessor".
Majority of early Digital Signal Processors were word-addressable. Some
of them are still produced in significant quantities.
Two of those (TI TMS320C30 and ADI ADSP 21xx series) played major role
in my  professional programming education.

Few word-addressable Digital Signal Processors had non-power-of-two
words. Motorola 24-bit 56K series was probably the most popular of
those, but there were others as well.

Microchip's PIC micro-controllers are word-addressable with quite
varying word width. According to Wikipedia, they are descendants of
General Instrument CP1600 CPU. I suppose, that their ancestor was
word-addressable as well.

In the world of general-purpose microprocessor, DEC Alpha (until EV6)
was more like word-addressable than byte-addressable, although it is a
matter of point of view.