From a purely theoretical level, how few transistors do you need to build a working CPU?
+4
A:
Interesting, but hard to say. You would need to define some parameters:
- What instruction set
- in-order or out-of-order
- pipelined or not
- branch-predicting or not
- register width
The 8088 has 29k transistor, but I doubt that woudl be what you're looking for.
Calyth
2009-01-24 02:35:35
You don't need to define those parameters at all. Just use whatever uses the least transistors.
paxdiablo
2009-01-24 02:49:09
I saw a chart somewhere about the "evolution" of less transistors. Doesnt the new nano-stuff got very low transistor count?
Filip Ekberg
2009-01-24 03:39:10