🚀 go-pugleaf

	In re: Motorola's continual announcements . . . is it fair
to compare the 68030 to the 80386, etc.?
	
	Yes.

	Firstly, it is clear that Motorola's architecture is a lot
cleaner than Intel's.  Certainly their chips may be a year or so behind
Intel (i.e. 68020 and 80286, 68010 and 80186, etc.); but their chips are
far superior.  Even if you insist on comparing the 68010 to the 80286
it is not clear at all that the 80286 wins hands down;  the '010 has an 
architecture more well-suited to implementation of multi-level interrupt
multitasking systems.  The fact is that for implementation of real
systems the 68010 in many cases is a far more appropriate choice than
the 80286.  (about Unix implementation, see BYTE article last month.)
And of course the 68020 is far and away the superior chip compared
to the 80286, and the '020 has been available in real computer systems
for some time.  From this point of view it seems reasonable to compare the
'286 to the '020 rather than the '010, and here the comparison is clear.
'020s are used (as you all know) in Sun workstations, TurboAmigas, etc.
'286s are used in ATs.  There is really no comparison between the two
classes of machine.

	Another important point to make is that operating systems implemented on
the 68000 series chips will run fairly well on the higher-grade chips;
UNIX, AmigaDos/Intuition, Mac Operating System, ST GEM/TOS, et cetera are
all capable of taking advantage of the higher-level chips' capabilities
(especially UNIX and AmigaDos/Intuition), although some optimization
wouldn't hurt.  From the point of view of the Intel chips, the 8088-based
MS-DOS is nothing more than a kludge on the 80286 and 80386; for that
operating system to take advantage of those chips a complete re-write
must be done, and is in the process of being completed as we speak.
This new operating system however will most likely be incompatible to
a great degree with the old, 8/16-bit MS-DOS and will contain major bugs
for some time.  AmigaDOS/Intuition has been running on the 68000 for
about a year now, and Unix implementations for the 68000/68010 chips have
been floating around for at least 3 or more years.  To compare the 80386
with the 68020 is absurd; the '020 has been around for some time now and
has a lot of debugged software/operating systems running on it; the
'030 will inherit that software and blaze with it whereas what will the
'386 do?  Run character-stream UNIX and 640K MS-DOS?
				-Mitsu (hadeihi@husc4.UUCP)

P.S. BTW, have you guys heard about the 78000 (!?)  See Nanobytes in
the latest BYTE (the //GS issue).  This is a RISC uprocessor with a
rated speed of 20 (VAX-equivalent?) MIPS . . . this kind of speed
totally blows away the RT PC (note: the RT PC performed just a hair
better than an PC AT in benchmarks . . . see PC World or PC magazine
of a month ago. . . not very impressive . . .)