[sdiy] IN your mind, what is ....

[Rainer Buchty]

> This is indeed interesting news... there are a number of bad
> design-choices behind IA-64 which makes me doubt it in the long run.
> Let's say it hasn't been a big seller.

They had forecasts that Itanium servers would gain $25B revenues by 2004.
They now corrected their forecasts to $8.7B by 2007.

Or the other way round: In the second quarter after its official
introduction, already >10.000 Opteron servers were sold but only <5000
Itanium servers.

> > > Admittedly, the 6502 was the first girl I ever kissed -- umm, I mean the
> > > first CPU that I programmed in machine language! -- so I've got a soft spot
> > > for it. Though it was no sophisticate, the '02 was hardworking and friendly,
> > > and we had many good times together. :-)
>
> You need to get our more often!

Uhm, that's not me who you were citing. But OTOH, I fully agree that the
6502 is just sweet (although the first girl I ever kissed was a Sharp
MZ80K :)

> > The thing which I still like most about the 6502 is that you can build
> > 2-CPU systems from it so easily. Just clock them off 180° phase different
> > clocks and they will happily share the same system resources. The same
> > works for Motorola's 6800/9; that kind of multiprocessing was IIRC used in
> > the Fairlight CMI series I and II (to bring this somewhat on-topic again :)
>
> Interesting. I haven't even thought about that! ;O)
> You're excussed for bringing it a little more ontopic! ;O)

:)

It's something I really like to have with e.g. Atmel AVRs to set up a nice
"processor/controller" architecture with one controller spreading around
parameters via shared memory to a set of sub-processors which do nothing
but computing -- uninterrupted by the data distribution.

But the 6502 or 6800/9 approach with the inverted clocks and a simple bus
gate (aka 74244/245) can't be adopted. There needs to be a more
sophisticated bus controller which then leads to BUSRQ/BUSACK-kind of
protocols interrupting the sub-processors.

I don't want to have the voice processors interrupted by the MIDI/GUI
processor...

Rainer