Quote:
Originally Posted by SpeedGeek
Actually, any external memory access (read or write) will incur wait states. But the most wait states typically occur in Chip RAM because that particular RAM was (by design) the slowest RAM in the system.
Motorola/Freescale added features to advanced 68K CPUs to try to improve performance for the condition of external memory access wait states. These features are an instruction cache, data cache, write buffer, copyback, store buffer and non-sequential pipeline execution (Note - These features vary with CPU model).
The general idea here is to prevent or at least reduce the occurrence of an execution pipeline stall. If the execution pipeline is kept busy doing things like instruction decode or an effective address calculation (while external memory access is pending or preferably avoiding the external access completely with a cache hit) then overall performance is improved.
The CPU only sees one bus. The difference in access speed for different address spaces on the bus is determined in hardware. The custom chips also see one bus which just happens to be a small part of the larger CPU bus.
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Thanks for your detailed explanation, SpeedGeek. Your last paragraph is the most interesting statement for me.