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The 6502 is an 8-bit processor designed by MOS Technology in 1975, based on the design of the Motorola 6800. When it was introduced it was the least expensive full featured CPU on the market by far, at about 1/6th the price, or less, of competing designs from larger companies such as Motorola and Intel. It was nevertheless faster than most of them, and, along with the Zilog Z80, sparked off a series of computer projects that would eventually result in the home computer revolution of the 1980s. The 6502 design was originally second-sourced by Rockwell and Synertek and later licensed to a number of companies; it is still made for embedded systems.
 
Unlike the Intel 8080 and its kind, the 6502 had very few registers. It was an 8-bit processor with 16-bit address bus. Inside was one 8-bit data register (accumulator), two 8-bit index registers and an 8-bit stack pointer. When the 6502 was introduced, RAM was actually faster than CPUs, so it made sense to optimize for RAM access rather than increase the number of registers on a chip.
 
6502 processors were used in a variety of home computers of the early 80s, for example in:
References:  Documentation archive at 6502.org
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24 650x chips in collection: show thumbnails
 MOS
  6502
   MPS 6502
   6502
   6502 A
   6502AD
   6502 B
  6510
   6510
  7501
   7501R1
  850x
   CSG 8500
   8501
   8501R1
   8501R4
   8502R0
  650x peripheral
   650x peripheral MCS 6540
   650x peripheral 6526
   650x peripheral 6522
   650x peripheral 6529B
   650x peripheral 6526A-1
   650x peripheral 6526 (CSG)
 NCR
  65C02
   NCR65C02A
 Rockwell
  6501
   R6501AQ
 Synertek
  6502
   6502
   SY6502A
 VLSI Technology
  65C816
   VL65C816
 WDC
  6502
   W65C02SP-6