🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <509@sbcs.UUCP> root@sbcs.UUCP writes:
>As for showing up in new industry iron, I thought Sun went with their
>Sparc RISC chip (with promises to upgrade the existing Sun-3 line to
>68030 "sometime in the future"), and Apollo was going AMD29000 - 
>thus just jumping ahead to Supercomputing workstations rather than
>bothering about the next incremental speed change in 680?0.

Ahem.  68020 * 4 is an "incremental" speed change? The 68030 at 30 Mhz
more than matches the SPARC/29000/MIPS crowd in actual performance,
and I wouldn't want to bet against Motorola on the 68040, which will
probably be out before the '486 (Intel claims 1990 as the ETA for this).

Also, my sources tell me that "first silicon" of the 68030 was last
April, and general availability at 16 Mhz is 4th Qrtr 87, about the same time
Intel finally gets to production of the '386 at 20 Mhz.  Given the
history of CPU clock speeds, it's a good bet Motorola will be producing
30 Mhz '030's before Intel produces a single 30 Mhz 'x86.

Motorola can now achieve significant performance improvements
in the '030 simply by increasing the cache sizes and translation
lookaside buffer size--a rather minimal design change.  Don't
be surprised if a "68031" (or whatever) is announced in about a year.

--Alan@pdn