SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

From: Iggy Drougge <optimus_at_canit.se>
Date: Mon Aug 20 21:11:34 2001

Tony Duell skrev:

>> I take it you're no big fan of load/store designs?

>Actually, load/store architectures do tend to have a large number of
>internal CPU registers, and those registers tend to be general-purpose.
>Which means I have no real problem with them.

There must be two load/store designs, then; those which rely on fast memory
access, and those which don't, yet rely upon it and compensate through a large
number of registers. The 6502 would belong to the first case.

>> >Eh? Yes, there are some special-cases on the 6809 (MUL, for example). But
>> >the 6502 has many more. Heck, on the 6502 you have to use the X register
>> >for one kind of indrect and indexed addressing and the Y register for the
>> >other form (on the 6809 you can do any addressing mode with X or Y (or
>> >with U or S for that matter). On the 6809 you can transfer values between
>> >any 2 registers of the same size. On the 6502 you can't even transfer
>> >between X and Y without destroying the accumulator contents (IIRC).
>>
>> I was specifically thinking of all the different registers and the way you
>> combine them. But I've not got enough experience to make any insightful
>> comparisons.

>If we ignore the registers which are likely to be 'special' on any real
>processor (PC and flags, for example), then IIRC, the 6809 has the
>following registers :

>A, B (Accumulators, can be considered to be the 16 bit D register)

>X,Y (Index registers)

>U,S (Stack pointers)

>DP (Direct Page pointer).
[snip]

>But in general, U and S are equivalent. So are X and Y. And in some
>cases, even all of X, Y, U, S can be used in the same way. For a
>processor with only a few registers, that's pretty reasonable.

But then again, that's a lot of registers compared to the 6502. And they're
not as flexible as the 68000 set of registers, AFAIK.
Tell me, are there any common eight-bitters with more registers than the 6809?

--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
Iggy tipsar: Vill du l?sa en PDF-fil, men saknar l?sare, skicka den till
pdf2txt_at_adobe.com, du f?r den tillbaka som ren ASCII till din epostadress.
Received on Mon Aug 20 2001 - 21:11:34 BST

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