🚀 go-pugleaf

lmvec@westminster.ac.uk (William Hargreaves) writes:

>Why have Atari made the Falcon a 32-bit machine with only a 16-bit data bus.
>Surely, this will mean it only runs half as fast as it should.

No.

Certainly, a 32-bit CPU <-> RAM databus is superior to the 16-bit bus,
but "half as fast" is far from accurate...  

You see, the CPU doesn't spend all it's time accessing memory.  Many
instructions involve no memory access at all.  Others access memory,
but also spend a lot of time processing the instruction.  And if an
instruction or data is already in the on-chip cache, it will be just as
fast regardless of the bus width.  

A 16-bit bus is slower than a 32-bit bus, but it is also cheaper - just
as the architecture for a 16MHz chip is much cheaper than for a 32MHz
chip.  

--
Warwick
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