Posted By
MMS
on 2017-02-19
08:31:32
 |  Re: A mathematical demo
OT as usual 
What is the main roadblock to get higher speed 7501/8501 with the current technology + SRAM?
Bringing up the frequencies surely brings heat and uncertain operation, so the original technology do not let too much possibilities.
But lower fabrication technology, like 65nm will significantly increase the speed of gates and reduce the power consumption.
(SRAM is significantly (~50-100x) more expensive, but can provide 10 ns access times while current DRAMs has 60 ns, and we may not talking about gigabytes, but megabytes, mean 40-80 USD/MB cost for SRAM)
If you compare even the 130nm technology used ~15 years ago in Athlons64 VS HMOS/NMOS's 2 micrometer (2000 nm!) technology, it become evident, that with 100nm fabcrication process the 6510/7501/8501 could be a very very small and very fast CPUs allowing high frequencies.
(in fact Bill Mensch stated, that even with 2000nm technology he had few 6502s that could operate on 12MHz !)
Do you think, that with the available CPU documents, anyone would be ready for such a task? and how much it would cost, knowing how well known and well documented this chip is? (I know that FPGAs are far more flexible and available, so it is just a point of discussion, for interest)
Please do not by shy, tell me if I just told BS!
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