3 ms·
The 68k was so much simpler than the 432 that it came out about over a year earlier, despite starting two years later.
by aidenn0 4y ago
The 68k was so much simpler than the 432 that it came out about over a year earlier, despite starting two years later.
- Taniwha 4y agoand yet it was a 32-bit core, vax class architecture, so unix was a relatively easy port. I think the really big problem with the 432 was all that hard wired microcode - rumor has it that it was buggy enough that subroutine calls could take over a millisecond (because they effectively called malloc() which in turn could trigger garbage collection) - stuff that's simply on say a 68k (push the next PC on the stack and jump) becomes a nightmare on a 432 if to fix a bug you need to spin the chip to change the microcode (to be fair at the time rammable microcode was all the rage, but it did take more area and you had to solve the booting problem). Anyway turning off the interrupts for a millisecond is a non starter for so many microcomputer applications ....