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Re: [f-cpu] Status quo



Hi Nikolay,
There are software libraries implementing arbitrary precision
arithmetics like libgmp, and they're ported to all major architectures,
including those that don't implement BCD in hardware. So this shouldn't
be a concern.

that's true. But... from this point of view, you can emulate everything with a library. A turing machine capable device should be sufficient. A standard PC is - compared to a mainframe - so "slow", because it's emulating itself to death. Every bit has to be done in software, because hardware is expensive and difficult to upgrade. An IBM /390 had a simple 8 Bit CPU with 16 MB RAM. The luxury edition contained even two of these. For all the other jobs the mainframe got it's hardware devices, even for such simple tasks like reading a record from a file. And even the standard edition with one cpu served a company with 4.000 terminals.

So, what is the main design goal of the f-cpu? Developing a damn cool cpu is a hard job. But taking a lot of our spare time to develop, implement, test, program a cpu which is far less state-of-the-art like some other cpus is not that motivating. It should be better than every other cpu, I can buy.

15 years ago there was no other free cpu, so it was the first of it's kind. But today there are some other free cpus like the OpenRISC 1000 and is successor the OpenRISC 1200. Meanwhile running with ported linux kernel and libc. You can find them on opencores.org.

Shouldn't it be better than that?

Regards
Ralf


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