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From: Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond
Date: Wed, 1 May 2024 15:31:37 +0300
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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.