23 Oct
2005
23 Oct
'05
4:04 p.m.
Allison wrote:
An 8080 could not do it and graphics has little to do
with it.
I make this claim for custom IC design. I say it is posible for two reasons
but not practical. The first reasion is based on the IDEA that PCB layout
and IC layout are much the same so macro-cells could developed
as basic blocks, as well as graphic blocks to display the layout.The second
factor is this design is not going for speed in both layout or gate delays.
A resonable amount external memory is called a 8 inch floppy.
I don't want to develop the latest generation CPU but something
that fits with 8080 -- 8088 layouts. I don't want to forget about
system bootstrapping something is easly forgotton when doing
cross development.
FPGA P&R is a really large array problem that eats
memory and cpu.
What else is out there that's not wintel, fast enough and can address
a large memory that runs a fairly current UNIX. That also assumes
the software that can P&R the FPGA is available as source.
P&R is mostly sorting is my guess. However my designs view point for
open source
is being able to keep the computer system capable of bootstaping itself.
Looking at the
latest version of red-hat I find it hard to do any real development work
as everything
is becoming too interconnected with every thing else.
Allison
PS. I like small computers -- I just use big ones like PC's to play games.
12 to 18 bits to me is a nice sized machine.