schmitz@fas.ri.cmu.edu (Donald Schmitz) (06/07/89)
Can anyone give a brief summary of the performance and software visible differences of the '020 and '030? In particular, I have heard rumors that due to the '030 on chip MMU, memory accesses are slower than an '020 with no MMU (I would think the MMU could just be disabled). We have a lot of embedded system '020 code that does not use memory management, and want to know if moving to an '030 will buy us any performance. Also, is software binary compatible? We are using an old SUN (OS 3.5) C compiler to generate executables, which only knows about the '020. Are there any '030 unique instructions we would NEED to use that we couldn't generate? any that we would WANT to use? Finally, assuming the same clock speed and memory system, what sort of speed difference should we see between the two? We have heard estimates of 15% to 100% speedups in the '030, why the big disparity? (different benchmarks?). I'll summarize and post any email responses. Don Schmitz (schmitz@fas.ri.cmu.edu) --