Its hardware is primarily composed of a [[6502]] processor, the Video Interface Controller ('VIC') graphics and audio chip and two [[6522]] timers. The base machine shipped with just 5.5kb of RAM.
Unlike the VIC-II of the Commodore 64, the VIC acts invisibly: it interleaves its memory accesses with the 6502 and thereby never introduces a wait state or any other delay. As a result it has a much more limited amount of bandwidth, restricting it to 20a cramped 22-column display(much like the 20-column CPC in mode 0). The display is character mapped but the character set is stored in RAM so it nevertheless offers a large degree of pixel addressing. Individual characters can either use a [[ZX Spectrum|Spectrum]]-esque approach of being 1bpp with a separate colour attribute byte, or can just be 2bpp with a semi-local palette from the colour attribute plus two global colours at the cost of pixels being twice as wide.
The sound generator is unrelated to that of the Commodore 64, providing two tone or noise channels. In the modern era it has been discovered that each is implemented as a shift register, allowing arbitrary 11-sample asymmetric 1-bit samples to be loaded.