Imagine in steampunk fashion wed get an alternative future timeline where computer tech froze in 80s due to some physical limitation that prohibited shrinking transistors. all typical laptops would have same config as this awesome project. what would the society become?
I believe the actual silicon of a 6502 is much smaller than the DIP package, so even if we couldn't shrink the silicon itself much more, you could just take up more space inside the package, and use a package that has more pins in it, like current CPU designs. You would probably hit a bottleneck at some point since I believe the speed of light is a problem for processing speed at some point, but then I'd expect we'd just go into massively parallel systems, with multiple cores acting somewhat individually
I was thinking lately about how much memory you could handle on a 6502. The BBC Micro had a 16KB block of RAM paged between up to 16 ROMs/RAM but if you could have 256 banks you could do 4MB. One problem is that that would require a very large PCB. Another problem is that the OS searches for commands on all the ROMs and this would become slow for so many banks; one solution would be to limit the ROMs to the first few banks and let the rest be RAM.
It could be useful for some sort of minicomputer for business applications.
Imagine in steampunk fashion wed get an alternative future timeline where computer tech froze in 80s due to some physical limitation that prohibited shrinking transistors. all typical laptops would have same config as this awesome project. what would the society become?
I believe the actual silicon of a 6502 is much smaller than the DIP package, so even if we couldn't shrink the silicon itself much more, you could just take up more space inside the package, and use a package that has more pins in it, like current CPU designs. You would probably hit a bottleneck at some point since I believe the speed of light is a problem for processing speed at some point, but then I'd expect we'd just go into massively parallel systems, with multiple cores acting somewhat individually
I was thinking lately about how much memory you could handle on a 6502. The BBC Micro had a 16KB block of RAM paged between up to 16 ROMs/RAM but if you could have 256 banks you could do 4MB. One problem is that that would require a very large PCB. Another problem is that the OS searches for commands on all the ROMs and this would become slow for so many banks; one solution would be to limit the ROMs to the first few banks and let the rest be RAM.
It could be useful for some sort of minicomputer for business applications.
Laptops would be a lot less common. If computers were stuck in this era for that long, fewer people would be interested. Prices would be high.
Amazing