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Actually, ARM1 was a much more efficient design for the masses. The Motorola 68000 oddly had 68,000 transistors, while ARM1 had 25,000. Both had a 24-bit addre
by chasil 5y ago
Actually, ARM1 was a much more efficient design for the masses.
The Motorola 68000 oddly had 68,000 transistors, while ARM1 had 25,000. Both had a 24-bit address bus.
It was introduced much later (1985, versus 1979 for 68000) despite using fewer transistors.
- mikepavone 5y agoFWIW, the 68000 transistors number is just marketing. I don't remember the exact number, but a full netlist has been produced from tracing the 68000 die and IIRC the actual transistor count is at least 20K less than that. Still a lot more than the ARM1 of course. I would guess that 68000 machine code is a fair bit denser than 32-bit ARM though which was important in the 80s when memory was still very expensive.
- chasil 5y agoInteresting, google had the 68,000 count on several sites. Were they trying to ramp up the transistor count? ARM Thumb and Super-H were supposed to address the code density problem. I see the smallest ARM binary at busybox.net is for Thumb.