FWIW, the 68000 transistors number is just marketing. I don't remember the exact... | Hacker News

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		mikepavone on Jan 28, 2022 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Atari System V Unix – Unofficial Website FWIW, the 68000 transistors number is just marketing. I don't remember the exact number, but a full netlist has been produced from tracing the 68000 die and IIRC the actual transistor count is at least 20K less than that. Still a lot more than the ARM1 of course. I would guess that 68000 machine code is a fair bit denser than 32-bit ARM though which was important in the 80s when memory was still very expensive.

chasil on Jan 28, 2022 [–]

Interesting, google had the 68,000 count on several sites. Were they trying to ramp up the transistor count?

ARM Thumb and Super-H were supposed to address the code density problem. I see the smallest ARM binary at busybox.net is for Thumb.

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