On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, John Wilson wrote:

> [...]
>
> I've heard they've done at least one other personality as a proof of
> concept kind of thing, but I doubt they'd have any reason to support
> that kind of thing, when they've already covered 90% of applications
> with the 80x86 thingy they've already got, so if it's true I doubt it
> will see the light of day.  Unless they start making Crusoe chips that
> are actually faster than something else, then they'd be able to spread
> out and start competing with anyone they felt like.

I wonder how fast you could get the underlying Crusoe chip to run if say
AMD or IBM bought them out and used the latest/greatest chip fabrication
process?  They could then crank the speed up to some obscene GHz rating.
You would lose the power-saving benefits of the Crusoe, but... I know
they're aiming for the low-power market, but it's an interesting "what if"
scenerio.

Given that the Crusoe is a noticeably simpler chip than the current Intel
processors. I'd think you'd get better production yields and you'd be able
to push it to a pretty high clock before it melted.

Of course I'd also like to see a 6502 w/64K of on chip RAM implemented
with a current generation chip fabrication process.  It'd be so tiny and
digustingly fast.

-brian.