3 ms·
I concur. You also had historical systems like the Four Phase, which split the CPU across 3 chips and the MP944, which used a small chipset. Not to mention that
by kens 3y ago
I concur. You also had historical systems like the Four Phase, which split the CPU across 3 chips and the MP944, which used a small chipset. Not to mention that you can easily put a CPU onto a single chip nowadays by using a FPGA.
The interesting question (at least to me) is how simple a CPU could have been built using TTL in, say, 1970. How much could minicomputers have been simplified? The retro low-chip-count projects generally use a huge ROM to implement logic or microcode, which wouldn't have worked historically.
That aside, the 16-bit serial CPU is an interesting project. Serial computers don't get much attention these days, but are important historically. Not to mention that the 8086 is derived from the serial Datapoint 2200 processor via the 8008.
- phire 3y agoIt's very true that serial computers don't get enough attention today, but I'm starting to wonder if they were underappreciated in the 70s. Serial designs were somewhat common in the '50s but it seems they had fallen out of favour by the 70s, except when engineers needed something very low end, like a terminal or calculator. Probably because core memory is inherently parallel and had become dominant throughout the 60s, killing off drum memory and acoustic delay line memory. With the rise of silicon memory, maybe a serial CPU would have worked well for a cheap-but-powerful minicomputer in the early 70s.
- Avshalom 3y agohttps://hackaday.io/project/11703-microcode-less-ttl-cpu/details https://hackaday.io/project/11703-microcode-less-ttl-cpu/det... is probably a good candidate.