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A comment on Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989). Parent comment

Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by ktpsns on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @04:17AM (#21003299)
How does this architecture perform in terms of FLOPs per Watt, compared with traditional register based architectures?
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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by opencl on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @09:52AM (#21005432)
FLOPs is probably not a very sensible measure for measuring hardware from 1985, nothing had FPUs back then.

Novix claimed that it achieved 10 MIPS at 7.5Mhz drawing about 0.35W. Kind of hard to verify how accurate their claims were with the chips being impossible to find though.

Also from 1985, a 20Mhz MC68HC000 drew 0.38W[2] for 3.5 MIPS (going by 0.175 MIPS/Mhz[3]).

So if you believe Novix's claims it had really good power efficiency for the time.

[1] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/a/a6/nc4016.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second

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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by abecedarius on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @11:21AM (#21006340)
As I remember it they claimed much faster interrupt handling too -- I don't remember the details. Something like only having to save a couple of hardware registers.
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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by mud_dauber on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @02:04PM (#21008170)
Exactly. Task switching was (if memory serves - no pun intended) no more than 3-4 references.
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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by kjs3 on Thursday September 19, 2019 @01:46PM (#21018650)
FLOPs is probably not a very sensible measure for measuring hardware from 1985, nothing had FPUs back then.

Umm...the Intel 8087 was '80 or '81, and it was AFAIK the most popular PC upgrade after memory. The 68881 was '84. My NS32081s have '84 datecodes but came out earlier. The Am9511/C8231 were mid to late 70s and all over the 8-bitters. Weitek had 3rd party solutions for 68k, x86 and lots of others in this timeframe, and MMI was pitching the 74S516 for the 68k early 80s.

Almost everything had an FPU option in 1985.

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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by lebuffon on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @09:20AM (#21005089)
It doesn't have a floating point processor so it would not do FLOPS very efficiently compared to modern machines.

In that era the power to performance ratio was not as critical since the clock speed of this device was typically sub 12MHz. (yes that is 12,000,000 Hz) Power losses are quite a bit less than at 1.2GHz

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