michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael maxwell) (09/30/86)
In article <877@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU> simoni@Shasta.UUCP (Richard Simoni) writes: >In article <262@husc6.HARVARD.EDU> hadeishi@husc4.UUCP (mitsuharu hadeishi) writes: > >>...Now that Motorola >>has released [the 68040] chip, they have in *every category of chip* a far >>superior chip than does Intel. 68030 > 80386, 68020 > 80286, 68010 and >>68000 >> 80186, 8086, 68008 > 8088. The 68000 series chips are in every case >>more orthogonally designed, faster, more compatible with each other, >>and easier to program. > >... A more fair comparison is between the 68020 and the 80386. From one who has little understanding of CPU chips (just potato chips :-), a question: I indeed thought that the 68020 was comparable to the 80386 wrt bus size, etc., and that the 68010 was more like an 80286. Can someone set me straight on this? In fact, I've been a bit puzzled about all the hoopla with the introduction of the 80386, about how it's specially designed for Unix, and how vendors (e.g. Lucid, Franz, Gold Hill) of pointer-intensive languages (such as Lisp and Prolog) are saying what a wonderful chip the 80386 was. Just a year ago, I heard a representative from one of those same companies saying what a terrible architecture the Intel chips had, in particular how bad their segmented memory space was when you had to chase around pointers, and how they would never sell their language for that chip line. Is the hoopla just because DOS programs can run on the 80xx(x) series (more or less) unmodified? --What? Let my employer take credit for my opinions?! No way!! -- Mike Maxwell Boeing Advanced Technology Center ...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm