🚀 go-pugleaf

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