As a layman on this topic, I'm curious about the difficulty around this project:
It seems like a lot of people have gone through similar experiences of building an 8 bit CPU simulator/emulator. Curious why it's not 64 bits. I can guess the answer is "it's hard". I'm just wondering where the difficulty lies. Is it in the standards? The mechanical feasibility of connections? Actual limitations of building a 64 bit emulator on a machine powered by a 64 bit processor?
Apologies if the question seems obvious. I come into this knowing next to nothing and I could probably find the answer with some research of my own. Just wanted to ask the community for thoughts here ️
For this project? It wouldn't have been difficult to upgrade the machine to 64-bit, it's really just a matter of increasing the bus width and register size.
But it would slow it down massively due to me writing it in a general purpose programming language and passing around booleans everywhere, there's a lot of for loops that copy things in and out of buses and I would have to increase the size of the ALU to accomodate the bigger numbers.
Designing a simple 64 bit CPU is not really more work than a simple 8 bit processor. 64 bit CPUs tend to have more features than just wider registers though.
It seems like a lot of people have gone through similar experiences of building an 8 bit CPU simulator/emulator. Curious why it's not 64 bits. I can guess the answer is "it's hard". I'm just wondering where the difficulty lies. Is it in the standards? The mechanical feasibility of connections? Actual limitations of building a 64 bit emulator on a machine powered by a 64 bit processor?
Apologies if the question seems obvious. I come into this knowing next to nothing and I could probably find the answer with some research of my own. Just wanted to ask the community for thoughts here ️