68k Cpus


sehs33

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mmm, bare my question, but wont there be a benifit if the next revision of our beloved handheld included, beside the 1 zilion ghz cpu they will decide to add, two normal and simple 68 k cpus? this will make it much easier for developers to emulate other stuff on machines using those CPUs, just a thoguht...
 
It would be a complete development nightmare - you would have to keep stopping the 68k cpu to emulate the rest of the target hardware to ensure to get it in sync, you would have to keep retrieving the contents of the processor registers, have some way of both of them to access the memory/etc. It would probably be slower than the cyclone we have now.
 
I see, thanks a lot guys, my brain kept believing that more old CPUs will make it easier to get things done perfectly, but that was logical and convincing :)
 
Yup, if your going to stick a 68k in there, you might as well throw the rest of the system in there with it and just emulate the one system (or as many as possible with the same basic hardware, like some arcade boards)
 
I'd love to see a handheld built around an FPGA, similar to the C-One or BAZIX One Chip MSX. Then you could just load a 68k core into the thing along with whatever other support chips you need, and away you go. How much power do FPGA's generally consume? I imagine programming a new core into the FPGA for each emulator would drain the batteries a good chunk.

--Zero
 
It would certainly be nice to have an fpga bolted to an arm core, thats for sure. I'm no so sure about building a handheld around just the fpga though - I know it can be done, but it's not exactly easy, and the arm core would be able to give it a bit of a boost, and help those people out that have never touched fpga's.

The power consumption is basically dependant on what is programmed inside, as is the maximum clock rate you can provide to the core. As for programming the FPGA, I'd just have a chunk of configuration ram which can be uploaded to via the arm, rather than having flash on there.
 
Lets just have a portable 3ghz P4 and be done with it, and a nice big tft & keyboard.

Lets then call the final result a laptop ;)
 
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