F8 – an 8 bit architecture designed for C and memory efficiency [video]

I wonder what's the point. 8 bits is not enough to store most values for most applications, it's bad for timers and multiplication, it's just a big waste of CPU cycles in general. The more work CPU has to do, the less time it spends sleeping, which is bad for battery-powered embedded devices. Perhaps, it has its place somewhere, but realistically, an 8-bit CPU these days is very niche at best. Imho, it's not going to take off in mainstream embedded.

I've looked at F8's ISA reference and it has lots of instructions to support 16-bit numbers, including all the basic arithmetic and bitwise operations, plus loads/stores/pushes and pops. It's almost a 16-bit ISA, actually.

Which is just bizarre since, again, we have 8086, we have MSP430. And if you are fine with most of your data being 8-bit (which is not that uncommon), there is e.g. 8051 which is still quite popular.