La tecnologia del 6502 fu disegnata nel 1975 da MOS technology.
La CPU che ha fatto decollare Apple con il primo Apple I e successivamente con Apple II.
Inoltre fu impiegato nel Commodore, Nintendo NES, NEC PC Engine, Atari Lynx.
Il 6502 fu prodotto dalla Rockwell per la Apple (AppleI e II)e la Commodore.
Caratteristiche :
- N-channel, silicon gate, depletion load technology
- 8 bit parallel processing
- 56 instructions
- Decimal and binary arithmetic
- Thirteen addressing modes
- True indexing capability
- Programmable stack pointer
- Variable lenght stack
- Interrupt request
- Non-maskable interrupt
- Use with any type of speed memory
- 8-bit directional data bus
- Addressable memory range of up 64K bytes
- "Ready" input
- DMA capability
- Bus compatible with M6800
- 1 MHz, 2 MHz, 3 MHz
- Choice of external or on-chip clocks
- On-chip clock option : External single clock input - Crystal time base input
- Pipeline architecture
- Single +5v supply