Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors

Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by CalChris on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @07:26PM (#13127473)

So this post is supposed to show a relationship between transistors and documentation. Fine.

x86 has 4181 pages of documentation. Quad-core Skylake has 1.75 billion transistors. This is 418560 transistors per page.

The 6502 had 12 pages of documentation. It had 3,510 transistors. This is 292 transistors per page.

Advantage x86.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by Narishma on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @08:09PM (#13127648)

You're comparing a single-core to a quad-core. Moreover, the Skylake is an SoC that contains stuff other than the CPU cores.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by CalChris on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @08:16PM (#13127682)

Yes, Skylake is superscalar, hyperthreaded, multicore, SIMD, OOO, speculative and a few other things too.

Yes, Skylake contains GPU stuff in its transistors and also in its documentation.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by theparanoid on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @08:19PM (#13127694)

Cache is the majority.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by mycall on Thursday December 08, 2016 @12:05AM (#13128520)

SPARC M7 wins at 10,000,000,000 transistors.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by akiselev on Thursday December 08, 2016 @12:41AM (#13128643)

That's because the SPARC M7 has a significantly larger die size. It's a very specialized chip that costs an order of magnitude more than consumer Intel hardware and is manufactured with tech a generation behind.

If Intel were to manufacture a chip as big as that, it would have 20-30 billion transistors.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by m_mueller on Thursday December 08, 2016 @12:48AM (#13128663)

AFAIK their biggest one is Knight's Landing at 8B transistors.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by bbcbasic on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @11:23PM (#13128393)

But if you have a box of 10k 6502's you can use the same 12 pages of docs and get 2920000 transistors per page.

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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by qb45 on Thursday December 08, 2016 @03:20AM (#13129097)

But it's only fair to compare Skylake with at most a dozen or two of 6502s because that's how many cores are included in the Intel chip.

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