Jubatian wrote: ↑Sun Dec 15, 2019 11:44 pm
Yes, that's also rather interesting, a quite unique CPU, in some regards it might do better than the 6510 due to being 16 bits. Otherwise it is not quite as fast by the clock counts in this Wiki, however it was clocked at almost twice the rate of the typical 6510 based machine (C64). The Wiki actually is quite interesting, I would say, tempting, to start experimenting with the thing
The 6 general purpose 16bits registers sure are nice.
They say 1 Mhz on that page but I don't think that's right.
Wikipedia says it's two 2Mhz clocks which would still make it slow in comparison
MOS6502: LDA addr,X is 4 cycles
CP1610: MVI, ADD, MVI sequence is 26 cycles
Even if by cycles they're counting both 2Mhz clocks effectively making it "4Mhz" similar to how a Z80 is clocked, that'd still be 6.5 equivalent cycles.
Z80s were usually clocked at 4x the speed of 65xxs of the time making the Z80 a pretty fast CPU.
So, I dunno.
Professionally I would definitely prefer working with a CP1610 than the 6502.
"How many general purpose registers?"
MOS: "None"
"What do you mean, none?"
MOS: "Well, you got an accumulator, that does math... but not addressing."
"What about X and Y?"
MOS: "Weeeeeell, those are only half an address, and you can't add arbitrarily to them. You can't even push/pop them directly..."
"Ooookaaaay..."
MOS: "And you can't index the stack directly.."
"Really selling it here..."
MOS: "And the stack is at a fixed 256 bytes area."
"The features just keep pouring in, don't they?"
MOS: "But it's really fast! Check the cycle count!"
(and was cheap too so there's that.)
The Intellivision is so feature & memory limited that it doesn't really matter tho. There's only so little to do