As a student and as a software developer, I’m constantly trying to learn more, dig deeper and further educate myself on anything related to my field. What has my attention right now is lower-level software development and optimization targeted for specific hardware. There are a great many papers out there written on the subject, specifically optimization practices on Intel hardware and the importance of keeping cache size and cache line size in mind. What really caught my eye in this research, was a mixture of the old and the new.
In 1970s, there was a 8-bit CPU war going on between (amongst others) Intel and Motorola. Motorola’s team in charge of development of a new chip were soon moved to the small-time MOS company. To make a long story short, the team ended up producing the 6502, a competing 8-bit processor at 1/6 the cost of Intel’s and Motorola’s leading designs, sparking “a series of computer projects that would eventually result in the home computer revolution of the 1980s”. How influential was the 6502? For starters, it came bundled with the wildly popular Commodore, Apple and Atari home computers of the time, with variants of the 6502 also gracing Nintendo’s NES and Atari’s 2600 video game systems.
Moving forward in history, we now have cutting edge HTML 5 running on web browsers on computers with 1,000,000 times the memory that the Atari 2600 could support (8 KB could still do amazing things). And now, the group from Visual6502.org has made a great visualization of the processor in action using HTML 5’s canvas. The demo comes with a custom program which can be executed step-by-step with each instruction lighting up different transistors on the processor.
The best part? There’s a github repo: it’s open source.
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