On Wednesday 04 January 2006 06:16 pm, Dwight Elvey wrote:
From: "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at
blazenet.net>
On Wednesday 04 January 2006 09:31 am, J.C. Wren
wrote:
This fellow has some interesting projects. A
6502 opcode compatible
CPU implemented in latches and EEPROMs. A NAND-gate based MC14500B.
And a CPU using (mostly) only transistors. Also a introduction to
microprogramming article, and some other good stuff.
<URL:
http://people.freenet.de/dieter.02/index.htm >
I don't know if anyone else mentioned this page in the past. I
don't recall it, and I tend to follow the homebuilt CPU threads here.
If you've seen it already, sorry about that.
I wonder how fast you could get one of those to go...?
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies.
--James M Dakin
Hi
I suspect the limits are bus and speed of the EEPROM's. One
can get EPROMs that are in the 50 to 60 ns someplace but
getting data from normal random access memory can be
an issue. Using one of the newer protocols, such as DDR
would require a memory interface that was almost as complicated
as the uP you were building.
You're probably right, but I don't think I'd want to go there anyhow.
Considering the seriously low speed of some of those early 8-bit parts it
wouldn't be at all hard to improve on it. Heck, I know of a lot of people
that went to some nontrivial effort to do things like upgrade a stock Kaypro,
and I remember thinking how nifty it'd be when I first heard about a 20 MHz
z80 coming out. And with simple programs and efficient design you could get
some good results out of such a setup.
Still, there are a number of processor models that
make sense
for using slower memory. I've seen one that used a 20 bit data
bus and most instructions were 5 bits. This means that 5 operations
can be done on one instruction fetch. This doesn't work well
with the typical RISC machine because you need operands.
It does work with zero operand machines quite nicely :)
Yep, I imagine it would. :-)
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin