From Computer Weekly, Thursday November 30, 1978, "Rockwell joins 16-bit micro market"

"Announcement expected next month from Rockwell Electronics, with a part currently designated Super 65"

Largely compatible with 6502 bus structure, it's said to have an instruction set capable of running Pascal. "Rockwell is developing a compiler for the language."

"Super 65 runs at a 10MHz clock rate and can address 2 Mbytes of memory directly. Some peripheral circuit are under development, including an 80MByte memory management chip."

So that implies a 21 bit address bus - 16 bits plus 5 - with the MMU extending that to 26 bits and a bit more... ???

And the company is said to be developing a silicon on sapphire version. I remember when SoS was to be the future of fast chips!



However, it looks like it got killed, or was declared non-viable, when Rockwell became a second source for the 68000, according to this Italian bulletin:
https://archive.org/stream/Bit_005/Bit_005_djvu.txt

"Rockwell, the American primary second source of the powerful 16-bit device developed by Motorola, plans to start sampling from the second quarter of 1980.

The 68000, declared a company spokesman, was selected because considered suitable to "safeguard" the investments made in the Super 65 in terms of resources and time and suitable to complement the line of micro 6500."

or is it a 20-bit address bus, for 1 megaword?

Also, it says "69000" in one place. Is that just a typo?

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That's quite an odd typo. I wonder if they were mixed up with the 6809? That came out in '78, apparently.

If it was one megaword, then it would have had a 16-bit wide data bus - that's got some advantages of course, but does it fit into the claim of being bus compatible?

I wonder what "largely bus-compatible" means. I guess I thought they basically did the same thing with phase 2, R/W\, just in a wider bus. I wonder how many pins it had. 48? 64? It doesn't sound like it could drop into an '02 socket like the '802 could.

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I posted about this on G+ and Mathew Murphy wondered if this Super 65 might have been the beginnings of what became the 65816.

Love to see the spec on this thing, notably the instruction set.

I feel the same way! Even though the thing never became a reality, I'm very curious what ideas they had cooked up.

And FWIW I think there is a typo; it should say 68000. They're saying 68000 and 6502 were both derived from 6800... which of course is debatable, but that's what they seem to be trying to say.

As for a wider bus while leaving phase 2 and R/W the same, that's a reasonable theory. OTOH, maybe they stayed with only an 8-bit bus, and hoped the SOS process would let them run things fast enough to overcome the handicap. [Edit: memory would also have to be faster, though.]

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In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
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There seems to have been a similar effort from Synertek: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/151182-synertec-6516-pseudo-16bit-cpu-for-a400800/

It could also imply a 20-bit address bus that is word addressed (1M 16-bit words). If it was a straight extension of the 6502 this is very possible.