nbvs@cl.cam.ac.uk (Nicko van Someren) (02/14/91)
VLSI, the people who build the ARM2 and ARM3 chips for the chip making end of Acorn, now ARM Ltd., very queitly announced advanced info about some of the new ARM chips. ARM 600 will be very similar to an ARM3 but will have a memory controler on the chip, based on the MEMC2. ARM 700 will be the same but also have a RISC FPU on the same slab. ARM 800 will be as ARM 700 but with a bigger cache. The artical mentioned that they may have a writeback buffer to improve the performance when writing out to memory. No indication was given as to what speed the chips would run at save that it was hoped that they would be faster than the ARM3 (VLSI rate the ARM3 at 25MHz) and that the ARM800 was far enough off that it would go even faster. By the way, the MEMC2 chip is now a VLSI listed part, though all this really meens is that one day it may get fabricated and when it does you can get samples from them. Since they only seem to have small quantities of info. and it is all said to be provisional I wouldn't hold your breath for a new machine from Acorn but at least it meens that something will happen one day. I will post more info when VLSI send me some data sheets... +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nicko van Someren, nbvs@cl.cam.ac.uk, (44) 223 358707 or (44) 860 498903 | | "Go and buy an Aleph One ARM3 card and stop whining!!!" | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+