3 ms·

Pardon my ignorance on the topic, but I've often wondered if it's possible to take one of these older CPU designs and "just" increase the address space and make

Pardon my ignorance on the topic, but I've often wondered if it's possible to take one of these older CPU designs and "just" increase the address space and make the manufacturing process smaller (but otherwise leave the instruction set and architecture as-is) to create a modern bit version at a high clock rate for embedded or mobile use? Or is there a lot of "devil in the details" that has prevented such a thing from existing? It seems to me like upgrading one of these existing designs would be much cheaper R&D wise that you'd be able to compete very well on price for the IoT or other markets.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
While it might (I don't know) be possible to make the manufacturing process smaller, you couldn't increase the address space without effectively rewriting the entire ISA. You could use bank switching or an MMU to increase the effective address space (allowing the machine to access more RAM than it can physically address), which was done even back in the day, on pretty much every machine. >you'd be able to compete very well on price for the IoT or other markets. Why do you think that the Z80 and the 6502 (and their derivatives) are still on the market? :-D