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From: chucks@pnet51.orb.mn.org (Erik Funkenbusch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: The 68050 - end of the 680x0? (was Re: The Amiga's Future)
Message-ID: <5110@orbit.cts.com>
Date: 10 Jun 91 19:05:01 GMT
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torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan Torrie) writes:
>  Actually, reading between the lines, this announcement sounds like
>the beginning of the end for the 680x0 line.  The article says that
>the '050 will be an evolutionary upgrade, using just improved process
>fabrication and a few small architectural changes to get its
>increased speed.  All in all, it sounds very much like the situation 
>with the 68030 vs 68020 - claimed "double the performance" with an
>evolutionary upgrade, which actually ended up with only 25-30% 
>improvement.

Perhaps an 030 on a MAC is 25% speedup.  but i had a 020 machine before this
one and i only recieved about 3% the speed of a stock Amiga.  when i got the
030 in this one, i shot up to ever 10x the speed of a  stock Amiga.. that's
hardly a 25% increase.  the ONLY difference was that the 020 was 16Mhz and the
030 is 25Mhz.  but that only accounts for approximately 25% increase.  just
speeding up the processor.

>  
>  Why do I see this as the beginning of the end?  Well, by all accounts, 
>Intel's 80586 will be as revolutionary a chip from the 486 as the 386 
>was from the 286.  Reports of an i860 on board, superscalar processing
>etc seem to dominate any discussion of the 586.
> 
>  If Motorola is just planning an evolutionary upgrade for the 050, I
>can't see how this is going to compete head-to-head with the 586.

All this is just talk.. as none of us KNOW what each new chip will be yet.  i
hardly doubt that even Intel OR Motorola will know untill they finalize the
design.

>
>  My guess is that Motorola has been told by its major 68030/040 users
>that they're ready to switch away from the 680x0 family [e.g. NeXT,
>Apple with possibly the 88K, HP with their own PA RISC] for their
>high-end products, and so Motorola is not putting too much effort into
>designing high-end follow-ups to the 68040. 
>
>  What do you think?  Will the 68050 be the last high-end member of
>the 680x0 line?

I hardly think that any of Motorola's MAJOR players are telling them they will
swith to 88000's... Since i would imagine that Amiga/Mac/Atari/NeXT/etc.. are
the bread and butter of the 68XXX line.. with the Unix stations pulling up
after most of those.. just how many 68XXX base Unix Stations are being sold
these days?  not many.

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