SARGON@UMass.BITNET (09/28/86)
I have seen three references to the 68030. Does such a beast actually
exist on paper or otherwise? If so would someone kindly pass along
some information on it. Thanks in advance.
-Steve
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Sargon@Umass.BITNET Sargon%Umass.BITNET@WiscVM.Wisc.EDUfouts@AMES-NAS.ARPA (09/28/86)
I have the following (not verbatim, I've already filed the issue
in the circular file (:-) report on the 68030 from last week's EE-Times
magaizine:
So many trade publications were writing about the 'impending'
announcement of the 68030 (and 68040) chips that Motorola decided they
had better announce the chip. They won't be shipping sample quantities
until next July.
I don't remember details, except that it has a 32 bit wide data
and address path to memory and uses higher clock rates than the 68020.
Marty
----------nather@ut-sally.UUCP (Ed Nather) (09/28/86)
In article <860927204514.0000059A.ACYB.MA@UMass>, SARGON@UMass.BITNET writes: > I have seen three references to the 68030. Does such a beast actually > exist on paper or otherwise? If so would someone kindly pass along > some information on it. Thanks in advance. It exists, mostly, on paper. All of the details have not yet been decided, so it isn't even vaporware yet -- it exists only as an announcement by Motorola to try and keep designers from designing in the 80386 until they can (quick! hurry!) get something better on the market. Intel didn't announce the 80386 until they had it (mostly) working, in real silicon. Motorola should be ashamed. Disclaimer: these opinions are for sale. Send cash: they could be yours! -- Ed Nather Astronomy Dept, U of Texas @ Austin {allegra,ihnp4}!{noao,ut-sally}!utastro!nather nather@astro.AS.UTEXAS.EDU
preston@felix.UUCP (Preston L. Bannister) (09/29/86)
Probably the most significant feature of the 68030 is that the MMU is on-chip. This is a big win in terms of speed/cost. It also has a data cache in addition to the code cache. I think there are probably other little tweaks for more speed. Maybe Atari should just wait until the 68030 comes out to replace the ST. :-) On chip MMU means lower cost/simpler board, and should have fewer wait-states with regular DRAMs. With microprocessors that are this fast, it starts to make sense to use Lisp for program development and to forget about "lower-level" languages like Pascal, C, Ada... :-) A next generation ST could have a small Lisp interpreter (like XLisp) in ROM. Lisp compilers are getting quite good. The ORBIT compiler (for Scheme) generates code that compares favorably with compilers for more conventional languages (see "ORBIT: An Optimizing Compiler for Scheme" in the "Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '86 Symposium on Compiler Construction", SIGPLAN Notices v21, #7). There are comparible compilers for PSL and Franz Lisp (and possibly others). ======================================== Preston L. Bannister USENET: ucbvax!trwrb!felix!preston BIX: plb