64-bit CPU

[Henry Spencer]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, John Macdonald wrote:
> (30 years of Moore's Law is visible - nowadays we consider
> 64k bytes to be small for a level 1 cache, 30 years ago it
> was acceptable as the maximum limit of the address space for a
> small system (it was already too small for mainframes and was
> becoming obvious that it was too small for minicomputers, but
> for a micro-processor it was chosen as a tolerable limitation.

You'd need a new rev of the architecture to go larger, but it wouldn't be
that big an architectural design problem to just double the widths of the
registers and make some small adjustments in the instruction set.  Much
easier than the somewhat tortured process that produced the 68000, not to
mention the 386... 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

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