🚀 go-pugleaf

My question for the DSP community is,

	Is the DSP96002 an orphan chip ?

Motorola have produced some very good DSP chips over the last 5 or so
years and I have used both the 56K and 96K effectively in a variety of
projects. However, these days the competition is getting fierce. With
the C30/C40, 21020, the DSP32C and it's decendants and even the dreaded
i860, the 96K has a lot of company.

Once upon a time (circa '88) Motorola announced the DSP96001 which was
to be "the first member of Motorola's Family of single chip HCMOS,
low-power, general purpose, IEEE floating point DSPs." Whatever
happened to it ? Does anyone know whether Motorola intend to develop
the 96K family further, particularly in the *down market* direction ?

I am aware of the DSP296002 and the functional modifications to the
basic DSP96002 such as the program cache and simultaneous 32 bit
integer and 64 bit floating point register usage - all very nice but
still rather expensive. What I'd really like to see is Motorola do with
the 96K what they are doing with the 56K - lower prices and on-chip
perhiperals. High speed serial ports, communications links, more DMA
etc, maybe at the expense of one of the external memory interfaces,
would be great, just like TI only with the far superior (IMHO) 96K
core. Is this just wishful thinking ? Will it ever happen ? Should I
forget the 96K altogether and use the TI chips for these facilities ?

Maybe the term "digital signal processor" for this chip a misnomer ?
Perhaps "high performance IEEE floating point coprocessor for really
high end applications" is a better name :-)

Any opinions on this subject are welcome :-)

brucet

-- 
          bruce tulloch sydney australia - brucet@extro.ucc.su.oz.au
***complex problems have straight forward, easy to understand wrong answers***