Re: Past Blast - "Wonder Woman 1984" - Corp Guy Using PET

On 06/04/2025 03:27, rbowman wrote:

On 6 Apr 2025 00:14:27 GMT, Robert Riches wrote:
 

Around 1980 or so, I had a short assembly program for 6502.  It may have
been a college assignment.  Just for fun, I rewrote it for 6800 and then
for 6809.  Then, I counted the number of instructions in all three
versions.  The 6800 version used 2/3 the number of instructions as the
6502 version.  The 6809 version used half of the instructions of the
6502 version.

 An early RISC processor! We doan need all those steenking instructions!

My friend who worked for ARM back in the day when it was just Acorn said that the story was when looking for a processor better than the 6502, they hadn't the money for a lot of transistors or the equipment needed to design a CISC CPU. The 6502 had a small instruction et, not many transistors and ran uber fast compared with z80s due IIRC to it not taking several cycles to execute an instruction.
So they whittled their instruction set down to the bare minimum and the rest would be 'done in software' .
What they ended up with barely used any power at all, and was faster than a 6502. And very cheap to make, using less than 25,000 transistors on 3µm fabrication .
ARM found themselves with a chip that wasn't 'industry standard' but was small cheap fast and very easy on power consumption, so it bumbled along in embedded microprocessors apps. Helped by the licence model that meant anyone could put an ARM core on their purpose built chip, for a small fee.
And then came the mobile phone, and the rest is history...
A typical example of the needs of the day driving the technology.
Sadly as others here have pointed out an ARM processor that is as fast as the latest INTEL bollocks tends to use the same amount of power these days.
--
Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that don't protect,  masquerading as public servants who don't serve the public.