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If you factor in that your MBP could probably comfortably emulate 100 6502s in real time, 1000x isn’t quite as severe an overestimate. Get the GPU in the game
by mokus 7y ago
If you factor in that your MBP could probably comfortably emulate 100 6502s in real time, 1000x isn’t quite as severe an overestimate. Get the GPU in the game and, even with terrible warp utilization and cache efficiency, you still might be able to hit that 1000x for purely academic purposes on a desktop card with HBM (maybe 2500 real-time-emulated 6502s on a 250w system).
Move to the microcontroller world, though, and 1000x is a vast underestimate. The main core in a current project of mine runs at 24 MHz and draws around 1.2 mW without even entering sleep. This system could probably emulate a Master 128 just fine in real time, for about 1/10,000x the power.
- tom_ 7y agoMy MBP can probably comfortably emulate 150 x 1 MHz 6502s in real time, but your average 6502-based system is a system, not just a 6502, and the Acorn stuff is no exception. There's a lot more to emulating it than just dealing with the CPU. The Master 128 runs at 2MHz. For each emulated microsecond you need to (broadly speaking) do at least 2 CPU updates, 2 VIA updates, and 16 bitmap bits/1 teletext glyph. 24MHz = 24 cycles per emulated µsec :( - good luck even squeezing the video output into that, let alone the other stuff. Rather you than me! (This also ignores handling the FDC, ADC, and ACIA. The devices accessed via the VIA will also take a bit of time to emulate...)