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Oren Beck wrote:
Well- why not have some ubergeeken amongst us whack together some prototypes?
I'll bring the mask layouts, if you bring the fab equipment capable of running a fairly recent DRAM process.
Oh...and I'll probably use just about *ANYTHING* other than the 808x family, which I've always viewed as an abomination (the better mousetrap doesn't always win). The 6502, 6809, and several other lesser well known parts (harvard architecture DSP like cores, stack-based machines like the Harris RTX series and Atmel MARC4, or even PIC's for god's sake) are IMHO all better suited for such a machine. :)
If you're not really serious about pushing the state of the art, you can roll an array of CPU flavor(s) of your choice and a respectable amount of memory in modern FPGAs. You can squeeze in a pretty decent number of processors (depending on the core, of course...you get more 6502's than 32-bit MIPS cores!), where this really suffers vs. a custom solution is the memory. The biggest FPGA's are currently toping out around 1 MByte of internal block memory.
...but then who's ever going to need more than 640KB, anyway?!? :)
- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net