Apple II vs ARM

[regnirps@aol.com (Regnirps)]

I ran across some more material - on my shelf all this time.

ARM1 is 1985 in 3 um fab and 25000 transistors -- not bad for a 32 bit
processor! Intended for 4MHz, it went 8. Cheap (affordable)DRAM at the time
required a wait cycle so it did 4 MIPS. These will do full speed with static
RAM.

ARM2 added a multiply unit, I Boothe multiplier if I remember, originally
shipped in 8MHz for the Archimedes but faster version came along like 10 and 12
and more. 2 um fab this time and support chips for memory management and video
were added. Its the one in the old Radius Quickdraw accelerator card.

ARM3 was 1.3 um and 25 MHz and then 0.8 um and 33 MHz. This is the first with a
4K cache so quite a bit of the time it can go full speed. Up now tp 300,000
transistors, but still small compared to the 1,200,000 of the 80486DX. The die
are so small that the yield from a wafer is fantastic compared to competitors
so prices are much lower.

These all had 26 bit address (same mistake as Apple in the beginning) and 32
bit data.

The more modern ARM6xx and 7xx are more impressive yet. The new all-in-one 7500
from Cirrus is 60 MHz in a low power low cost package and of course the SA110
StrongArm for the Newton does 200 MHz.

Charlie Springer