6800 Simulator

[Haldis Rucci]

The 6800/6811 family of processors fueled the early home computing explosion and its derivatives were the processors of choice for many personal computers including Apple, Commodore64, Nintendo etc, and numerous gaming consoles. Its direct decendents are still widely used today as embedded processors.

The 6800/6811 is an 8 bit, dual accumulator processor with flexible memory addressing modes. Compared to other processors, it's compact, and highly orthogonal instruction set makes it easier to program.

Do you have this issue? Vertical bands DX12 AMD RX6700XT
One of the reasons I sticked with Nvidia.
Cloud texture shows vertical lines AMD DX12 - #48 by wavesandsky It does seem to only affect the 6700 series cards.

The RX 6800 is faster than the 3070ti in many benchmark tests let alone the RX 6800xt. Just make sure you have enough room in your rig for the new card to fit. My RX 5700xt barely fit on the width so I made sure that my new cards dimensions were going to fit.

Oh, and make sure your power supply is hefty enough. Sounds like you should be good but AMD says you need at least a 650w PS for the RX 6800 but the RX 6800xt is 700-750w recommended minimum I believe.

My current specs is an i7 10700k 32gb,
It has an old GPU sitting it ATM.
PSU I have is a Seasonic Focus 750W platinum
As long it can drive my 3440x1440 it should be ok.
The 3060ti is no slouch. The 8gb of VRAM just makes it less appealing for WQHD. Probably offer great 1080p performance.

As the original poster I am finding the discussion useful, thanks. At the moment the monitor I am using is an old 24" one only supporting 1900 x 1200 resolution so at that i guess most cards are going to work. To that end I got a used 5700xt as a temporary measure. I will probably succomb and get a new ultra wide monitor at which point I would need to ugprade the card. Whether I can hold out until the next step down in the new cards come out (7800xt) I am not sure though if not the disscussion so far will be of use.

The 6800 ("sixty-eight hundred") is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System (latter dubbed 68xx[1]) that also included serial and parallel interface ICs, RAM, ROM and other support chips. A significant design feature was that the M6800 family of ICs required only a single five-volt power supply at a time when most other microprocessors required three voltages. The M6800 Microcomputer System was announced in March 1974 and was in full production by the end of that year.[2][3]

The 6800 has a 16-bit address bus that can directly access 64 KB of memory and an 8-bit bi-directional data bus. It has 72 instructions with seven addressing modes for a total of 197 opcodes. The original MC6800 could have a clock frequency of up to 1 MHz. Later versions had a maximum clock frequency of 2 MHz.[4][5]

In addition to the ICs, Motorola also provided a complete assembly language development system. The customer could use the software on a remote timeshare computer or on an in-house minicomputer system. The Motorola EXORciser was a desktop computer built with the M6800 ICs that could be used for prototyping and debugging new designs. An expansive documentation package included datasheets on all ICs, two assembly language programming manuals, and a 700-page application manual that showed how to design a point-of-sale terminal (a computerized cash register) around the 6800.[6]

The 6800 was popular in computer peripherals, test equipment applications and point-of-sale terminals. It has also been used in arcade games[7] and pinball machines.[8] The MC6802, introduced in 1977, included 128 bytes of RAM and an internal clock oscillator on chip. The MC6801 and MC6805 included RAM, ROM and I/O on a single chip and were popular in automotive applications. Some MC6805 models integrated a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI).[9] The Motorola 6809 was an updated compatible design.

Galvin Manufacturing Corporation was founded in 1928; the company name was changed to Motorola in 1947. They began commercial production of transistors at a new US$1.5 million facility in Phoenix, Arizona in 1955.[10]

By the mid-1960s, Motorola had expanded their semiconductor division under the direction of Lester Hogan. Motorola's transistors and integrated circuits were used in-house for their communication, military, automotive and consumer products and they were also sold to other companies. In 1968, Robert Noyce left Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel, and Fairchild responded by hiring Hogan as the new CEO. Eight other Motorola employees moved with him, they became known as "Hogan's heroes". The resulting chaos was nevertheless short lived, and the company continued to grow through this period.[11]

By the early 1970s it was clear that most of the large companies in the semiconductor space, including Fairchild and the still-new Intel, were planning to introduce microprocessors. Intel began shopping around the initial concept of what would become the Intel 4004, and on their sales trips they visited Victor Comptometer in Chicago looking for potential customers. Victor had introduced the world's first electronic calculator, using early integrated circuits. There, Tom Bennett saw the design.[11]

In 1971, Motorola decided to enter the calculator business. Looking for someone to lead the effort, the hired Bennett away from Victor. Shortly after joining, Olivetti visited Motorola with a outline of a design for a microprocessor they were planning to use in a series of programmable calculators. Motorola agreed to complete the design and produce it on their PMOS lines in Phoenix.[11]

While the design was eventually completed successfully, their fab proved unable to produce the chips. The problems with the line had become obvious with a number of similar failures; it also proved unable to make competitive memory devices and other designs. To save the contract, Motorola licensed the design to their competitor, Mostek, with the requirement that Mostek could only sell outside the calculator market. Mostek then put the design on the market as the Mostek 5065.[11]

Customers continued to approach the company with new ideas, and it became increasingly obvious that these concepts could be implemented using a single flexible microprocessor design. A new effort began in late 1971, but in early 1972, the marketing department returned a report stating they could only sell 18,000 over a five year period. Unconvinced, Bennett hired Link Young to try again. Young returned with a potential order for 200,000 from National Data Corporation, more than enough to start design work.[13]

The team was composed of designer Tom Bennett, engineering director Jeff LaVell, product marketer Link Young and systems designers Mike Wiles, Gene Schriber and Doug Powell.[14] They were all located in Mesa, Arizona, in greater Phoenix. By the time the project was finished, Bennett had 17 chip designers and layout people working on five chips. LaVell had 15 to 20 system engineers and there was another applications engineering group of similar size.[13]

Tom Bennett had a background in industrial controls and had worked for Victor Comptometer in the 1960s designing the first electronic calculator to use MOS ICs, the Victor 3900.[15] In May 1969 Ted Hoff showed Bennett early diagrams of the Intel 4004 to see if it would meet their calculator needs. Bennett joined Motorola in 1971 to design calculator ICs. He was soon assigned as the chief architect of the microprocessor project that produced the 6800.[16] Others have taken credit for designing the 6800. In September 1975 Robert H. Cushman, EDN magazine's microprocessor editor, interviewed Chuck Peddle about MOS Technology's new 6502 microprocessor. Cushman then asked "Tom Bennett, master architect of the 6800", to comment about this new competitor.[17] After the 6800 project Bennett worked on automotive applications and Motorola became a major supplier of microprocessors used in automobiles.

Jeff LaVell joined Motorola in 1966 and worked in the computer industry marketing organization. LaVell had previously worked for Collins Radio on their C8500 computer that was built with small scale ECL ICs. In 1971, he led a group that examined the needs of their existing customers such as Hewlett-Packard, National Cash Register, Control Data Corporation (CDC), and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They would study the customer's products and try to identify functions that could be implemented in larger integrated circuits at a lower cost. The result of the survey was a family of 15 building blocks; each could be implemented in an integrated circuit.[13] Some of these blocks were implemented in the initial M6800 release and more were added over the next few years. To evaluate the 6800 architecture while the chip was being designed, LaVell's team built an equivalent circuit using 451 small scale TTL ICs on five 10 by 10 inch (25 by 25 cm) circuit boards. Later they reduced this to 114 ICs on one board by using ROMs and MSI (medium scale integration) logic devices.[18]

Bill Lattin joined Motorola in 1969 and his group provided the computer simulation tools for characterizing the new MOS circuits in the 6800. Lattin and Frank Jenkins had both attended UC Berkeley and studied computer circuit simulators under Donald Pederson, the designer of the SPICE circuit simulator.[21] Motorola's simulator, MTIME, was an advanced version of the TIME circuit simulator that Jenkins had developed at Berkeley. The group published a technical paper, "MOS-device modeling for computer implementation" in 1973 describing a "5-V single-supply n-channel technology" operating at 1 MHz. They could simulate a 50 MOSFET circuit on an IBM 370/165 mainframe computer.[22] In November 1975, Lattin joined Intel to work on their next generation microprocessor.[23]

Bill Mensch joined Motorola in 1971 after graduating from the University of Arizona. He had worked several years as an electronics technician before earning his BSEE degree. The first year at Motorola was a series of three-month rotations through four different areas. Mensch did a flowchart for a modem that would become the 6860. He also worked the application group that was defining the M6800 system. After this training year, he was assigned to the 6820 Peripheral Interface Adapter (PIA) development team. Mensch was a major contributor to the design of this chip and received a patent on the IC layout[24] and was named as a co-inventor of seven other M6800 system patents.[25] Later Mensch would design the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor.

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