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It would've been really bad compared to modern CPUs. Just one example: having no cache, instruction fetches would be slowed down to the speed of RAM, what's worse if that instruction writes/reads memory location then another RAM access would be issued, with high probability of accessing very different location additional timing penalties would occur (row pre-charge, etc.)


On the plus side, its entire address space (a whopping 1MB) could easily be on-chip, with the speed of a level 3 cache (Probably even a level 2 one).

That CPU wouldn’t need RAM (it would be a fun exercise to write an OS that can run on a modern CPU without external RAM)





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