Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!well!bandy
From: bandy@well.UUCP (Andrew Scott Beals)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Benchmarks (was: Re: A2620)
Summary: National's PACE was way before the 8086 and TI 9900
Keywords: history
Message-ID: <12209@well.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jun 89 16:27:01 GMT
References: <780@corpane.UUCP> <7084@cbmvax.UUCP> <25428@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6607@dayton.UUCP> <12201@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: bandy@well.UUCP (Andrew Scott Beals)
Distribution: na
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 19

In article <12201@well.UUCP> farren@well.UUCP (Mike Farren) writes:
>And since [the 8086] was (by at least a year, and I believe two) the
only 16-bit >processor in town, except for TI's weird chip, it didn't
seem all that bad >then.

Sorry, Mike, but National Semiconductor had a 16-bit chip way before the
8086 hit town.  It was called the PACE and it was a multi-chip 16-bit
big brother to their SC/MP (aka SCAMP) 8-bit chip.  

My memory also tells me that TI's 9900 hit the scene before the 8086 also, 
but it was difficult to get.

If you wanted to roll your own processor, you also could have put together
a 16-bit processor using four of the AMD bit-slice processors in parallel.

Any more discussion should probably be directed to comp.arch.geezers :-)

	andy
	bandy@well.sf.ca.us