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That level of performance had already been achieved. According to a French article (on www.apple-iigs.info) linked from Wikipedia, the 65C816 (introduced 1983)
by ken 8y ago
That level of performance had already been achieved. According to a French article (on www.apple-iigs.info) linked from Wikipedia, the 65C816 (introduced 1983) could 'easily' run at 16 MHz. It was only limited to 2.8 MHz so it wouldn't compete with the 7.8 MHz Macintosh. This is believable, as IIgs accelerator cards above 10 MHz were popular add-ons.
- klodolph 8y agoIs the 65C816 running at 16 MHz competitive with a 68000, though? The 68k has a 16-bit data bus, compared to the 8-bit bus of the 65C816, and the 68k has a bunch of registers on top of that. Although 68000 instruction timings weren't that great.
- rasz 8y ago65C816 is faster than 68K, what good is 16 bit bus when you spend at minimum 4 clocks fiddling your thumbs.
- klodolph 8y agoOk, I see what you mean. Even then, at that point in history it was becoming clear that memory speed would not keep up with processor speed, so I can understand why the 16-bit bus seemed like the way of the future.
- rpiguy 8y agoThe primary factor holding back the 65C816 was the required RAM speed. The 65XX processors required RAM almost twice as fast as the same clocked X86 or 68K. An 8Mhz 65C816 requires 70ns RAM, whereas an 8Mhz 286 or 68K can use 140ns RAM without wait states. 70ns RAM was very expensive until the early 90s, at which point the 65C816 had already missed its window.