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Comment by sinrostro | Hacker News Reader

I imagine Prof. Wirth must have thought that 32032 wasn't going anywhere soon 20 years ago.

As I see it, the ARM instruction sets (note the use of plural) are a moving target (look at Cortex chips with Thumb2 only). They are far from RISC if you count them, and the instruction encoding is horrendulous.

It's like saying "why not target Windows? I doubt that's going anywhere soon"

With FPGAs, your only risk is that the manufacturer discontinues the chip you targeted, and you can then target another brand with the same (or nearly the same) HDL code.

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100% spot on assessment! Wirth thought ahead well enough last time in making it modular and simple enough to easily port. They thought even better by putting it on a FPGA. And also with CPU and components simple enough to implement on ASIC with old node (350nm or 180nm). That's inexpensive enough to be crowd-funded.

Need the I/O stuff, etc to be implemented for the node, too, though...

Thanks. And I didn't even mention security in ARM chips (or lack thereof)

20 years ago was 1995. NS32k was long dead then; National retired it in 1990 when it was only six years old. Even when it came out, it was kind of an underdog compared the the already-five-year-old 68k, which was already powering the SUN workstations and went on to power any number of Sun competitors plus the Lisa, the Macintosh, and the PalmPilot.

ARM has been around at this point for 30 years, and yes, there are incompatibilities from one to the next. But it'll probably be around in some form for another 30 years.

And, yes, your Windows binaries will probably still be runnable ten years from now, and your Linux binaries probably won't be.

I imagine Wirth chose 32032 for its purported elegance, not its longevity or commercial practicality. As I recall they had all sorts of initial problems and then lost the war for that market segment against the 68k.

I have heard many people talk about the NS32k in positive overall terms, I've researched it a few times, it looks like a nice CISC architecture, but not different/better enough than the 68k at the time.

I do recall the team under Jack Tramiel at Atari looked into the NS32k for their new 16/32-bit system, and even built a prototype, and then tossed it in favour of 68k because of purported bugs in the NS32k.

The 32032 instruction set was wonderful to generate code for. There were a few early bugs (if a floating point instruction crossed a page boundary, and a page fault was triggered, hilarity would ensue), but those were ironed out well before the chip was abandoned.

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