[vcf-midatlantic] What limited the C64's CPU to ~ 1 MHz?

[Dan Roganti]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 8:47 AM, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic <
vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:

> Does anyone know the reason why the C64 only ran at ~1 MHz?    Was it to
> keep RAM costs or system cost as low as possible or was there a different
> engineering reason?
>
> (The Atari and BBC machines managed higher clocks, but were very expensive
> compared to the C= devices, although the 1977 Atari 2600 managed ~1.19 MHz
> out of it's 6507 (6502 with low pin count/less addressing)..
>


​The various clock circuits inside the different home computers was the
least of their problems. All of those different combinations used between
the various home computers were just methods they found to minimize their
Bill of Materials - because every penny was crucial to their bottom line
when making thousands of them in the consumer market.

There were still real and significant design challenges present in the
early VLSI designs of the 1970s to make these faster. But they slowly
marched on and made improvements every year to where we had the 8086
running at 5mhz and 68000 running at 8mhz already by 1979. This list below
is just some of design problems and they are all interrelated. Making trade
offs between each of these was a constant battle. This list is mostly
ordered by significance, but some of this could be a matter of opinion.

1. BJT, NMOS, PMOS, or CMOS logic families contribute to speed,
     eg. depletion-load NMOS is faster than BJT
2. Miller Effect [capacitance] prsent even on the silicon die
3. VLSI design geometries were limited to about 5um
4. Clock distribution across the silicon die [eg, too much clock skew]
5. Higher Clock speed required more power dissipation
6. Negative Bias voltage was a burden to compensate for Miller Effect[eg.
8080 ]
7. Lead Inductance present even on the silicon die
8. Slew Rate,
    eg, ECL being faster ran on smaller voltages, slew rate was less,
giving faster clock speed
9. TTL signals are above the noise floor
    eg, ECL being faster was below noise floor, ie power is negative voltage
10. TTL operate in saturation for logic signals, [eg. ECL being faster
operate in Linear region]
11. Square wave logic signals have more odd numbered harmonics
      than a linear analog device, reducing the possible bandwidth
12. Pin Capacitance limited not only the driver characteristics but also
the frequency bandwidth
​