Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[regnirps@aol.com (Regnirps)]

>supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)
>Date: Fri, Apr 3, 1998 03:56 EST
Message-id: <1998040308560001.DAA12021@ladder03.news.aol.com> wrote:

>>>According to an interview with Bill Mensch, even the 65816 at 4 MHz (which
>>>it was capable of at the time it was engineered into the GS) could
>>>outperform the original Mac, and 'Apple' purposely kept the clock speed
>>>down because of this.
>>
>>Yes, however, the foks from ACORN (6502 based BBC Computer 2MHz) visited
>>Western Design to look at the 816 and were pretty disapointed. On the way
>>home on the plane decided they could design something better than that slug
>>in their sleep. Thus the ARM, Acorn Risk Machine, later Advanced Risk
>>Machine) wasborn.
>>
>>Less than 20,000 transistors and went like a bat out-a-hell.
>
>The 65816 at 8Mhz does 4 MIPS and at 16Mhz does 8 MIPS.
>The ARM at 6Mhz does 8 MIPS.  That makes the ARM faster...but
>the 816 is not bad compared to your 286 or original Mac.


Lets hang on here!. The ARM is 32 bits wide with a barrell shifter and 16
general purpose registers. A single 32 bit instruction takes one clock and can
fetch from memory, add an offset, shift any number of bits and pre or post
increment an indirect address as well as conditionalally execute any
instruction all at the same time. In other words., an ARM MIP is worlds ahead
of an 816 MIP or '286 MIP! There just aint no comparison.

Charlie Springer