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Author Topic: 64E4 - MOS technology 32 bit 68K competitor?  (Read 6434 times)

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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: 64E4 - MOS technology 32 bit 68K competitor?
« on: January 03, 2013, 03:20:15 AM »
It's a bit nuts to suggest that the decision to add the Z80 was in any way influenced by the fact that, decades down the line, it runs much faster than the 6510 did in the mid-'80s. At the time, the usual clock range for the Z80 was 2-4MHz (I don't know whether they'd got up to 8MHz parts at this point, but if they did they certainly weren't common.) And that's just clock speed, which is a notoriously inaccurate indicator of performance between different architecures. The Z80 is a fairly capable CPU, to be sure, but it takes some 2-5 times more cycles per instruction than the 6502; then again, it can do a bit more per instruction. It mostly comes down to code quality. The reason so many of Commodore's competitors used the Z80 is because Zilog, unlike MOS, wasn't owned by Commodore.

(Also, the 6502 does not use multiple clock signals.)

In any case, psxphill is right; CP/M was pretty nearly dead by 1985, having been supplanted for business use by MS-DOS, and never really catching on with most Z80-based home computers the way it did with the hobbyist micros of the late '70s.
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"\'Legacy code\' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup
 

Offline commodorejohn

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Re: 64E4 - MOS technology 32 bit 68K competitor?
« Reply #1 on: January 03, 2013, 03:50:30 AM »
*facepalm*

Would you care to explain to me what in blazes the performance improvements of contemporary (i.e. modern) Z80 designs has to do with a computer designed in 1985? Hell, even the R800 (in the MSX Turbo-R) wasn't released until ~1990.

And if you'd actually read that second post: yes, the 6502 has two clock outputs. One of which is an inverted version of the other. It only has the one clock, which is why it only has one clock input.

Geez Louise.
Computers: Amiga 1200, DEC VAXStation 4000/60, DEC MicroPDP-11/73
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"\'Legacy code\' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup
 

Offline commodorejohn

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Re: 64E4 - MOS technology 32 bit 68K competitor?
« Reply #2 on: January 03, 2013, 03:45:39 PM »
Quote from: ChuckT;721128
I think the 1541 would be replaced today by an SD card, thumb drive or the C-64's electronics would be replaced by something that could handle a hard drive today.
Again you're suggesting that you could have improved on the management decisions of the mid-1980s by leveraging technology that didn't exist until much later. You seem to be confused about the direction in which time flows.
Computers: Amiga 1200, DEC VAXStation 4000/60, DEC MicroPDP-11/73
Synthesizers: Roland JX-10/MT-32/D-10, Oberheim Matrix-6, Yamaha DX7/FB-01, Korg MS-20 Mini, Ensoniq Mirage/SQ-80, Sequential Circuits Prophet-600, Hohner String Performer

"\'Legacy code\' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup