Mill Computing, Inc. › Forums › The Mill › Architecture › Inter-process Communication › Reply To: Inter-process Communication
I see you have worked out a fair amount of the details 🙂
A part you are missing is that the local address space as a whole is present in the global space, so no translation is needed to convert between a local and global address. The mapping is trivial, and does not require tables or look-up machinery such as a MMU. We have stolen a single bit in each pointer to distinguish whether the pointer refers to a local or global address. Locals are converted to global as part of the effective address calculation in memory-reference operations, and the memory hierarchy sees only global addresses.
A 32-bit Mill is possible, or even 16 bit, so long as that’s enough memory for the application; embedded usage for example. The rest of the Mill is really too heavy-duty for microcontroller use though, so the Z-80 and 6502 markets are safe from us.