🚀 go-pugleaf

>>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.  

can someone make a list of typical sorts of programs that would be really
"memory-intensive" so as to really suffer from this 16-bit memory bus?

				-Matt