Why does Natami have both CHIP RAM and FAST RAM? Isn’t CHIP as fast as FAST now when it is the same kind of memory? Why have both?
Jakob Eriksson
[ Admin ]
It is because of a design decision to simplify how the Natami is made. In theory, a common bus snooper could connect custom chips with the CPU and then all RAM could be chip RAM.
At this time though, RAM worked on by the custom chips can not be safely cached by the CPU. For this reason, there exists extra FAST RAM which the CPU can cache and hence work faster with.
In the far future, there could be some kind of bus cache snooping implemented between CPU and other chips, and then the distinction between FAST and CHIP would disappear.