On 7/15/2021 at 3:36 AM, kelli217 said:
So, then, let's drive this discussion in another direction. Assuming that, clock-for-clock, the 65C02 wouldn't be 'competitive,' would a max-speed chip nonetheless still be... 'acceptable' for modern-day tasks? Could you watch a 144p YouTube video? Play a 128kbps MP3? Render a modern web page with scripts and CSS?
The question becomes — with what RAM? These things depend on huge datasets being able to be accessed and manipulated, often with SIMD instructions, and there's still only the 64K address space, even with the kind of things that the X16 does via paging.
With this kind of sort of primitive MMU style of paging, though, a 65C816 suddenly becomes a much more attractive option. Windows 95 was able to run in the 16MB memory space that an '816 can access, and if the paging system used 4MB pages (scaled proportionally to the size of the X16's ROM pages [or 2MB if you'd prefer it scaled to the RAM page size]), then you've got a sort of supercharged version of the old DOS EMS. You can do some fairly complicated web pages with those kinds of resources.
But without a 32-bit data bus and a hardware multiplier at the bare minimum, you're just not going to be able to move enough data fast enough and get enough arithmetic done to play those compressed media files. Uncompressed (or 'trivially' compressed, like RLE or TMV) is no problem. The X16 can do that if you have a fast enough storage interface that you can keep the buffer full. A 3.4GHz '816-based system could push data fast enough to play 4K HD video at 60p if that's all it has to be doing.
No, because the instruction set simply doesn't have the needed operations.
As was mentioned above, there's no integer divide or multiply, let alone doing floating point math or the SSE instructions that operate on 4 integers at a time.
Scripts are a maybe, but again, note the performance numbers Scott pulled out above. A 3GHz 6502 would be running at the equivalent speed of a 100MHz x86 - but without the math coprocessor, or even multiplication or division.
If you think back to the 100Mhz days - yes, you can absolutely run a web browser on a 100MHz computer, but it's going to be much slower than a modern PC, and anything involving fancy math (such as decompressing JPG and PNG graphics) is going to be slooooooooooooooooooow.