semi-homemade micro

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: semi-homemade micro
>   From: Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net>
>   Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 13:33:01 -0600
>     To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>woodelf wrote:
>
>....
>> Having got a new PC ... 2 GHZ???  who knows the real speed.
>> I have tried Spare time gizmos - pdp 8 emulator  ( A minor bug
>> -- with windows  how do you get the bell to sound ?).
>> I was running some sort of diagnostics and had the RTC displayed
>> and for about 10 minutes of real time, the clock advanced a hour.
>> That must be at least 6x faster than the real thing on this computer.
>
>If a 2 GHz (give or take) x86 CPU emulates a pdp 8 at 6x, it means either the 
>code is inefficient, or the code contains a speed regulator that doesn't work 
>properly.

It's inefficient, there was no goal to be efficient only useful and interesting.

>The original PDP-8 took 10 clocks at 1 MHz to execute one instruction, a 2 GHz 
>CPU has 20 million cycles to interpret one instruction.  So at 6x realtime, the 
>program is using 3.2 million cycles to interpret one instruction.

An 8e series was around 1.5uS core cycle time and some instructions took a
few cycles.

However it's timing at the macro level is easy. FETCH, execute as needed.
So to fetch a 12bit word and decide one of 8 major actions is pretty light
on code to do.  The next step execute is tempered by addressing but thats
a minor calculation.  OPR instructions you need more decisions and they
have a distinct sequence.  Then the IOT, again it's all decided by the 
device but for codes like 6000Q-6007Q and a few others the path is already 
set.  EMA adds overhead in all cases.

>Most likely speed and efficiency weren't goals of the emulator, so I bring this 
>up not to discredit the program's author but rather to say: don't use that data 
>point as anything but a lower limit on what kind of horsepower it would take to 
>use a micro to emulate a PDP-8.  I imagine an AVR device at 20-40 MHz should be 
>able to emulate a PDP-8 at real time.

That may be possible. Keep in mind this type of emulation is almost like 
building a microcode sequencer.  

An alternate approach is a more hardware (ACC, Link, MQ, MAR, IR ALU
and shifter) and use a micro like 8048(or whatever) to controls the loads 
and all and not execute arithmetic logical or register ops in the micro.
Speed there could exceed the 6100/6120 series cmos parts as the micro
is decoding instructions and controling events rather than calculating.
the differnce is your approaching the real thing hardware wise but 
leaving out a lot of control logic (sequential or microded hardware).

Allison