mjkobb@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael J Kobb) (03/12/90)
Greetings, A friend of mine is getting ready to buy a Portable, but he is wondering: o Is there a possiblity of a 68030-based Portable coming out anytime in the next few months (I realize that this depends on Motorola's coming out with a CMOS chip, but I don't know what kind of progress they're making). o Is there any way to get a Portable to drive a full-page (or two-page) display? 3rd party stuff is okay... Has anybody used the SCSI color adapter with it? o How about the portable (Wallaby?) that uses the ROMs from your Mac, and then plugs into it to give it its ROM back? How much? Would it work with an SE/30? What's the battery life like? Many thanks for any help/advice anyone can give. Email's fine, and I'll summarize, or post it. Whatever. --Mike
jskuskin@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Jeffrey Kuskin) (03/12/90)
In article <1828@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> mjkobb@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Michael J Kobb) writes: >Greetings, > > A friend of mine is getting ready to buy a Portable, but he is wondering: > > o Is there a possiblity of a 68030-based Portable coming out anytime in the >next few months (I realize that this depends on Motorola's coming out with a >CMOS chip, but I don't know what kind of progress they're making). > This seems to be a common misconception. The current 68030 implementation *IS* in CMOS. (Actually, it's a combination of high-density NMOS and CMOS, which Motorola calls their "HCMOS" process). Now, while it may be possible to implement the entire chip in straight CMOS, eliminating the NMOS sections, the power consumption will most likely remain almost the same. The problem is one of clock rate -- CMOS consumes very little *STATIC* power (static means that no transistor switching is taking place). Unfortunately, if you run a CMOS chip at, say, 16 MHz., quite a bit of switching is taking place, and this is where the power consumption occurs. The bottom line is that a 68030 which consumes significantly less power than the current version is unlikely to appear for a little while. There's no reason a 68030-based Portable couldn't be announced, of course, but it will use the same 68030 as the II[cx,ci,x] use and will thus have a shorter battery life than the 68000-based Portable. -- Jeff Kuskin, Dartmouth College jskuskin@eleazar.dartmouth.edu