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Retrocomputing

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    There were also other differences. The 6809 (like other moto chips of the time) used a two-phase clock and, new to the 6809, had a hardware multiply instruction (which was a new thing) - the Z80 used a single phase clock and had to implement multiplication as a macro. The clock differences gave the 6809 faster memory access and more efficient instructions at the cost of a longer full clock cycle time, which was useful in some applications. Overall the 6809 was a more modern design - the price also includes some of the costs of development. Commented Oct 19, 2018 at 19:36
  • @J... The price almost certainly shouldn't include the price of developing the MUL instruction, since adding that to the 6800 family had been done at least two years earlier for an automotive embedded systems client, General Motors; the GMCM clearly predated the 6801. Commented Sep 19, 2019 at 21:12
  • That said, in some general-purpose computing markets, it seems companies probably were convinced by the the cool features. Hitachi quickly upgraded their Basic Master series from the 6800 to the 6809, and Fujitsu used not one but two 6809s in their FM-8 and subsequent (much more popular) FM-7 series. These had significant market share in the Japanese 8-bit world, on par with Apple and Commodore in the U.S.Their only competition was the Z80, since the 6502 never really took off in Japan. Commented Sep 19, 2019 at 21:19