Re: 1 or 2 MHz interrupt on PC

From: Steve Judd (sjudd_at_ffd2.com)
Date: 2001-05-08 02:09:27

Hola,

On Mon, 7 May 101 g.baltissen@hccnet.nl wrote:

> Hallo Per,
> 
> > Agreed. On a 500 MHz CPU you'll get a maximum of about 500 instruc-
> > tions per interrrupt, and the the interrupt latency including context
> > switch is usually somewhere between 200-300 cycles, iirc.
> 
> I was thinking about a 486-66. Seems we can forget the idea for the moment. 
> But within 5 years these 500-machines will be available for pennies, I hope 
> :)

I got curious, so I've been looking at the instruction timings at

http://www.quantasm.com/opcode_i.html

Sure enough, a number of instructions are down at the 1 cycle level.  But
others are in the 10s of cycles (still a vast improvement over the 8088
timings I vaguely remembered).

The INT opcode seems to take a lot more cycles in protected mode, and IRET
takes 8-27 cycles.  So perhaps 50-100 cycles for interrupt overhead?

So it looks to me like there's time for anywhere between 10 to maybe 250
instructions per interrupt, on a 500MHz machine (500 cycles/interrupt).
Dunno what your interrupt routine will do, but if there are N cycles
left over at the end, that leaves N MHz for the "non-interrupt" code to
run at; having a 50MHz or 100MHz machine for the other stuff doesn't seem
too bad to me (certainly if windows isn't running).

-Steve


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