port or wine

Port is wine isn't it?

If you mean the program to let you run windows applications then I think it is safe to assume no one will have a copy for the 8051.

Wine as in the compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Unix machines?

http://www.winehq.org/

If a $5 chip would be enough to run Windows applications, then the PC manufacturers would have a hard time.

"If a $5 chip would be enough to run Windows applications, then the PC manufacturers would have a hard time."

Actually, they'd have a very good time - just think what it'd do for their margins...!

But would you be willing todays prices for a PC, if you could pick up one of the better C51 chips and manage anyway?

But it would be good for the environment, since it would cut two zeros from the power consumption of a stationary PC, and combined with a solid-state disk, the only real power consumer in a laptop would be the backlighting for the display. With transflexive displays, life would be pretty good.

But would you be willing todays prices for a PC, if you could pick up one of the better C51 chips and manage anyway?

Off topic again, but anyway... Why would you want to put a 8051 in a PC? If you are looking to save money, consider a second-hand PC. I bought one recently for a fraction of the price of a new one (20% or so to be exact.) Take advantage of the crazy people that buy the latest-and-greatest of PC technology whenever it comes out. A 3-year old PC is worthless to them.
And it's good for the environment too. I'm sure that producing a new PC requires more energy than it consumes in its entire lifetime (think molten metal to make the metal parts, among the obvious things.)

It takes about 300kWh to melt 1 ton (1000kg) of steel.

If we assume that a computer contains 20kg of steel, then it would take 6kWh to melt it.

A PC that consumes 200W would consume that amount of energy in 30 hours.

So, do never ignore the amount of energy a PC can consume during it's lifetime.

So, do never ignore the amount of energy a PC can consume during it's lifetime.
the joke is that while everybody is on the PC manufacturers back to reduce power consumption, nobody get on Microsofts back for bringing out a Windows version that require a much more powerful (i.e. much more power hungry) PC.

Erik

But people are. That is why we talk about M$ Windoze.

I figure they already have the next two generations of Windoze ready and waiting until a processor manufacturer will be able to release something that will at least let the behemoth crawl.

The funny thing is that sometimes people are asking me why a web service or a program is running so lightning fast, and I answer: Because I'm running it on a sub-GHz 5-10 year old machine with Linux or BSD.

I prefer your interpretation. Port is wine.

I have noticed a lot of naive questions lately (sigh).

I am sure most here would enjoy a relaxing glass of wine after this question. (I probably would go for a diet coke instead but that is just me likely.)

Answering the question, WINE not only CAN'T be used in a C51 (simply because windows programs can't run on the physical hardware incompatible instruction sets), it's not possible to port due to size (IE there isn't 256 megabytes or more of memory to load applications into). Perhaps an ARM11 with dynamic recompilation for emulation of the x86 hardware, but that is far beyond the scope of anything a single person can do in a reasonable amount of time (IE a year).

Stephen

If you ignore speed (and the possibility of connecting hardware devices), then almost any processor can emulate a Windows machine.

You can add many gigabyte of RAM on a C51 and the C51 is Turing-complete so it should be able to solve any computation problem given enough time.

The power needed by a C51 isn't so high, but the amount of energy needed to just start a Windows application would be high, because of the very long time it would take.

In the end, even a multi-GHz C51 would have to fight a lot to just manage to load Notepad. Every 32-bit x86 instruction would require a large number of 8-bit instructions, and the lack of a real stack and pointers would force the C51 to swap data in/and out madly.

Since people do like to try strange things just to see if it is possible, it isn't totally unlikely that someone someday decides to try. Most x86 instructions are quite easy to emulate by a C program.