Subj : Re: Pocket386 is here!
To   : AKAcastor
From : Bob Worm
Date : Fri Jun 21 2024 10:12:27

  Re: Re: Pocket386 is here!
  By: AKAcastor to Mary4 on Thu Jun 20 2024 22:40:28

 > 16 bits does seem more than enough, was 32 bits ever really necessary?

I do have one example :)

When the mighty Acorn were deciding what to do after the 6502-based BBC micro, they assessed a bunch of 16 bit processors of the era and were pretty unimpressed, finding them all deficient in some way.

They looked at making their own processor and it soon occurred to them that the biggest bottleneck in current computers was memory access. It was slow and pushing data around a byte at a time multiplied the wait times. So if they were going to build their own processor, why not jump straight to 32 bits and quadruple the memory bandwidth?

And that's how we got the ARM...

BobW
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