Dr Jefyll wrote:
sark02 wrote:
There comes a point when a preference becomes a fetish... and trying to compare a 40 year old micro design with a modern ARM is where that line is clearly crossed.
[...] something that still finds a commercial niche?
To me, Garth's post claims relevancy for 65xx, nothing more -- a commercial niche, as you say, sark02. I'm glad to find agreement about that, yet on the other hand puzzled by the first part of the quotation, which (this is my first impression, at least) seems to be in reaction to someone stating that 65xx is equivalent to ARM, that they're interchangeable (which is ridiculous). Did someone seem to say that, or am I somehow getting the wrong spin from your post? Maybe there's some other explanation. I'll be happy for any clarification, especially as I suspect the conflict of opinions here will be revealed to be moderate to minimal.
In the podcast that Garth linked to, Bill Mensch talks about running the '816 at 10GHz with everything on chip (all cached) - "we can run as fast or faster than any ARM processor or any Intel processor..." He's saying that their design is simple enough that it can be, and will always be able to be, targeted to any manufacturing process and run at extreme speeds. So far, so good. "What couldn't you do with that?". Well, for one, you couldn't add two 32-bit numbers together in a single instruction. Then he goes on about how he doesn't like Apple because they chose the 68000, then PowerPC and then Intel instead of staying with the 6502, which would have been 10GHz by now if it weren't for the "marketing and capital pressures of big business". He sounds like a crazy and slightly bitter old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.
The "fetish" point is when all your weaknesses are strengths and the advancements of other designs are irrelevant because they aren't needed if you really think about it... Don't need a 32-bit ADD when you can just jump to this handy function. Don't need hardware DIV as the software function has been available for 40 years.
"You could build a brand new 16-bit Atari [...] with state of the art technology [...] with the fun legacy stuff". Wait a second, there was a 32-bit Atari evolution back in the 80s... it was called the Commodore Amiga. Nowadays you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 with a 1GHz ARM, 512MB RAM and 3D graphics. Holding on to the past like this is just a little sad.
One of Bill's last statements is that the 6502, "Continues to be used by the people who want to use it". And that I agree with.