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The King of the era was 68000. 1979. Way ahead of time, comparable to 80286 in many ways, or even 386.
by SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
The King of the era was 68000. 1979. Way ahead of time, comparable to 80286 in many ways, or even 386.
- ncmncm 6y agoAccording to Sophie Wilson, the reason Acorn had to design ARM was that the 8086 and 68000, with no cache, were limited by their bus bandwidth, and so weren't really faster than a contemporaneous 6502; their only real advantage over it was a bigger address range. She is in a position to know.
- klelatti 6y agoSteve Furber has said the same thing and Herman Hauser has said they approached Intel for an 8086 with higher bus bandwidth, but were turned away!
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoThere was no ARM in 1979. At the time ARM came into existence, there were already much faster 68010-68020. The biggest advantage of 68000 is much nicer ISA. 6502 was fast in case of making simple integer computation; for math is was really bad.
- klelatti 6y agoI think it's fair to say when the Acorn team were considering what to replace the 6502 with the chips they compared with were the 68000, 32016 and 80286 - and they felt in each case that memory bandwidth was the constraining factor. In the end the Arm1 with 29,000 transistors had performance that was as good as or exceeded the 68020 with 200,000. Incidentally, Robin Saxby the first CEO of Arm previously worked for Motorola and tried to sell the 68000 to the Acorn team!