Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[regnirps@aol.com (Regnirps)]

 toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) wrote:


>A 6mhz ARM emulating a 1mhz 6502. Right. Do we have any witnesses?

I think you are confusing MHz with MIPS. A 65C02 typical instruction is four
cycles and an ARM instruction is one cycle. So, simpy on a cycle count you get
about a 24 to 1 advantage for the 6MHz ARM. When you add the 32 bit width and
look at typical operations like additions of 16 or 32 bit niumbers or address
calculations, you get another factor of 4 or more. In other words, about a 100
to 1 performance ratio for a 6MHz ARM and a 1 MHz 65C02. Emulation of a 1 MHz
65C02 is trivial.

>And the Archimedes had custom co-processors of its own. They also
>had hardware floating point on the ARM, probably much earlier than
>the Amiga added a 68881/2 or 68040. Hardware floating point makes
>a _big_ difference for 3D polygon animation.

Something nobody was doing much at the time.
The ARM has a coprocessor trap for extenmding the instruction set with
coprocessors.

>>Apple had a real working prototype of an ARM A2 that can be
>>verified by Charlie Springer, an Apple employee of the time.
>
>Sure, but will he verify all these great claims you keep making
>about the ARM itself?
 
Sure, consider them verified.

Charlie Springer