robin@oakhill.UUCP (Robin Edenfield) (08/29/86)
I am presently involved in a project a Motorola to look into improvements and enhancements to the 68000 family architecture as exemplified by the 68020. Consequently I have several questions to put to the net experts. First I am interested in hardware monitors to help with our analysis of bus activity. Any pointers to companies that produce this type of equipment or papers describing the the design and use of such equipment would be greatly appreciated. Secondly I am interested in instruction frequency and addressing mode usage in 68020 systems. I have read the VAX study done by Clark and Levy, but I would like more specific information on 68020 systems, especially in regard to addressing modes. Any pointers to this type of information would be very helpful in our analysis. In addition, for you compiler experts and assembly language programmers, what are your favorite addressing modes? Also general systems information like frequency of exception processing and frequency of page faults is also interesting so information of this type is also requested. Finally what improvements would you like to see in the 68020? Since the next generation processor is supposed to be upward compatible with the 68000 family, I am more interested tweaking type improvements such as adding a data cache instead of radical departures from the 68000 family architecture such as implementing 3 operand opcodes. Please email your comments and information to me at oakhill!robin and thanks in advance. BTW I will try to summarize to the net if sufficient interest is expressed. Robin Edenfield