Author: John Coffey
Date: 16:04:33 03/09/00
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On March 09, 2000 at 18:10:07, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >On March 09, 2000 at 17:58:44, John Coffey wrote: > >>By the way, the 68000 has a 16 bit data bus with a 32 bit internal data bas. By >>my definition that is a 16 bit processor. They were better than 6502's for > >So by your definition, a PC with SDRAM is 64-bit, whereas a new Pentium III with >Rambus memory is 16-bit. Or maybe 256-bit, due to the interface to the L2 cache? >Gets confusing quickly... > >>chess programming but not by a huge amount. (Instructions on 68000 take more >>clock cycles than the 6502. We did some tests for video game programming and >>found the two processors to be pretty equivalent in our speed tests.) > >Even if they are roughly equivalent in terms of MIPS, the 68k can still address >much more memory, and it's much easier to do this. I bet this is one of the >reasons the Genesis whomped the Nintendo. > >-Tom In our speed tests on the above two platforms we found the 3.5 mhz 65816 Nintendo was similar to the 7.5 mhz 68000. We are talking processor speed only here and not all the extra support hardware. I also had similar results when I wrote a line drawing routine on both processors. What was the reason? Well the 68000 has bigger registers that can do more but the instructions take more clock cycles. (Some instructions take up to 10 bytes.) But the 68000 is much more fun and much easier to program. Everybody seemed to love the 68000. My office mate just reminded me that the SNES had better graphics hardware but in the game world we are talking ancient history here. It is my memory that the SNES sold more units but my office mate disagrees. John P.S. I still program Z80 for a living. If you want to talk about slow .......
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