Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!ece-csc!mcnc!uvaarpa!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: A Serious Thought About the FUTURE Message-ID: <8856@smoke.BRL.MIL> Date: 10 Nov 88 17:34:41 GMT References: Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) ) Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD. Lines: 15 In article sk2f+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Seth D. Kadesh") writes: >6502 series is a considerably underdeveloped chip - the 65816 is only limited by >the design Apple implemented in the GS. That's not quite right. The 6800/6502/65816 architecture is based on a single accumulator rather than a sizeable set of general registers such as the 68000 has. Also, even the 65816 still has too small a virtual address space (64K 8-bit bytes). Although one can cope with this by using segmenting schemes, it does get in the way. The 68000 provides a 24M 8-bit byte linear virtual address space, which is enough for almost any current application. The bottom line is that the 68000 architecture is much more convenient for the programmer. The main thing the 65* CPU has going for it is the relative ease with which existing Apple II software can be supported. That was important to you, to me, and to lots of other people, but it will gradually become less of an issue.