Re:Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502 (2021)
by sophacles on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @05:25PM
(#31913217)
IIUC this is because:
* mul/div take a lot of transistors and may not be a single or fixed cycle instruction.
* A lot of embedded systems don't really need those instructions anyway - they just encode discrete state machines or do something like networking that doesn't need * or / for operation.
* less transistors means the chips are cheaper, and single (or fixed) cycles per instruction means hard real-time is simpler to reason about.
* mul/div take a lot of transistors and may not be a single or fixed cycle instruction.
* A lot of embedded systems don't really need those instructions anyway - they just encode discrete state machines or do something like networking that doesn't need * or / for operation.
* less transistors means the chips are cheaper, and single (or fixed) cycles per instruction means hard real-time is simpler to reason about.
Is that correct?