The way I understand things, the thumb ISA in ARM processors is 16-bit in nature. It is 16-bit in the data it handles and memory it addresses. And yet the following link claims the Cortex M3 supports uCLinux.
Cortex M3 is Thumb-2 only, no ARM32 ISA. Thumb-2 is just Thumb with some more extensions. Is the uclinux compilation for the Cortex the first 16-bit Linux out there, or should we not call it 16-bit by the virtue of the size of memory it can address?
Lastly if the addressable memory is not what makes the bits of a cpu, can someone make a simplistic 8-bit core with enough instructions to make it Turing-complete and able to address at least 1MB of memory to boot uclinux?