Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!caip!ut-sally!seismo!gatech!akgua!akguc!mtune!mtuxo!houxm!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!manis
From: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vince Manis)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16
Subject: Re: Question on processor expansion
Message-ID: <297@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Jun-86 22:20:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.297
Posted: Thu Jun 26 22:20:16 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 30-Jun-86 04:45:34 EDT
References: <8606201839.AA06129@pavepaws> <477@elmgate.UUCP> <176@molihp.UUCP>
Reply-To: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vince Manis)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science
Lines: 16

I fail to see the attraction of the 68010. It's not substantially faster,
and the few extra instructions it offers are unlikely to do a great deal
in speeding up programs. The major virtue of the 68010 is that it supports
demand paging, which is useful in virtual memory systems. The existing 
ST MMU renders this advantage dubious.

The 68020 adds a fair number of instructions (notably 32-bit multiply and
divide), and is in general a winner. On the other hand, there is little
point in trying to add a 68020 to the ST directly, so I'm eagerly awaiting
the TT box. Neil Harris, are you listening????

I'm dubious about a $530 CDN price for the 68020, though: the July issue of
BYTE has an article on the Definicon 68020 co-processor board for the IBM
PC. Including 1MB of memory, a 68020, and a 68881 (FPU), the price they list
is US$995. That would cause me to guess that (in reasonable quantities) you
can get a 68020 for ~ $150 US.