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by brucehoult 1336 days ago
The 6502 is nothing like what we would call RISC today (the 6800 is much more modern RISC-like), but the evolution from 6800 to 6502, by largely the same design team at a new company, does somehow follow the RISC "quantitative approach" of getting the most performance from a given number of transistors (the 6800 and 6502 are about the same size), but it does it by adding complexity rather than by simplifying.
1 comments

> but it does it by adding complexity rather than by simplifying.

That's true - it simplifies a lot of other things alongside the ISA, but it's also apparent that, while it can do a lot of tasks faster than, say, a Z-80, the ISA forces one to take some creative approaches.

Literal ports of Z-80 code to the 6502 usually sucked.