James:
You could not be more wrong. Lots of microprocessors (8 and 16 bit) use arm cores. Very few linux ports exist to any of the 16 bit arm cores, and those are usually proprietary. ARM is huge in the 8 and 16 bit processor/SOC/ASIC markets..... Other companies pass the processors off as their own.
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb.html
*Thumb offers the designer*
*
Excellent code-density for minimal system memory size and cost
*
32-bit performance from 8 or16-bit memory on an 8 or 16-bit bus
for low system cost.
Thumb is a 16-bit instruction set grafted onto a 32-bit machine. It's good stuff, but it's still 32 bits under the hood. You still write exception handlers in the ARM instruction set, for example, and all the registers are 32 bits wide, machine instructions operate primarily on 32-bit data, ALU is 32-bits wide, etc. etc. (Disclosure: I teach a class on the ARM machine architecture at UC San Diego).
The external memory bus does not define the size of the host machine architecture.
8051, and HC11. Now _those_ are 8-bitters. :)To carry your logic through, any machine that runs Java natively would have to be 8 bits.
If I were the troll you allude to, I would have mentioned that Genesi won their PPC best of show award form FreeScale, using embedded Gentoo.
Ok, I'll retract the part about accusing you of being a troll. My apologies. :)
But I still think that most of your position and original post is nearly baseless, or at least not well presented. But we can agree to disagree, I think.
b.g. -- Bill Gatliff bgat@billgatliff.com