Greatest videogame device (was Re: An option - Re: thebeginningof

7 May 2010

...
     I still stand
my my statement that the master clock rate is meaningless. 
 Laws of physics disagree with you for sufficiently high orders of magnitude. 
 Care to explain? I can't think of a single law of physics that prohibits
 using as many clock cylces as I want for a particular operaiton. In which
 case, an 8MHz RISC processor which takes 1 cycle for a given operation
 could be a lot faster than a 1GHz processor what happens to take 256
 cycles for the same operation.  
 Except that there has never been a CPU built to run over 1GHz where a 
 given operation takes 256 cycles to execute. 
That is not a law of physics. If you want to claim that a 2GHz (or 
whatever) Pentium (or whatecer) is faster than a 4MHz Z80A then you'll 
get no arguments. But that is not the question.

...

 If you're comparing 1982 processors to 1982 processors, then yes, we 
 could have a spirited discussion about 6809 vs. 6502 vs. z80 vs. 8086 
 vs. 68000.  But this is 2010. 
And this is classiccmp. 

Do youu seriously believe that a 33MHz 80386-based PC (which were popular 
many uears ago) has the same processor speed as my PDP11/45 (which 
happens to hace a 33MHz master clock crystal) ? 

-tony

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Greatest videogame device (was Re: An option - Re: thebeginningof