Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!lll-lcc!dual!ptsfa!qantel!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!convex!trsvax!uhclem From: uhclem@trsvax.UUCP Newsgroups: net.micro.68k Subject: Re: The Motorola 68030 Message-ID: <55500016@trsvax> Date: Thu, 2-Oct-86 11:01:00 EDT Article-I.D.: trsvax.55500016 Posted: Thu Oct 2 11:01:00 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 7-Oct-86 19:09:15 EDT References: <2270@gitpyr.UUCP> Lines: 57 Nf-ID: #R:gitpyr.UUCP:2270:trsvax:55500016:000:3131 Nf-From: trsvax.UUCP!uhclem Oct 2 10:01:00 1986 ["The Knights who say Letni demand.....A segment register!!!"] >I agree that the Motorola chips are nicer in many ways than the Intel chips. >But to say Motorola has "released" the chip is stretching things a bit. >... >The 80386 is here now, and actually >has a system available (Compaq) which uses it. In other words, it's not >really fair to compare that which Intel has now with what Motorola will have >in a year. A more fair comparison is between the 68020 and the 80386. I agree that you cannot "fairly" compare the 68030 to the 386 by chip. You should compare the system as a whole. For example, Compaq does have a 386 box, but try one (I have). You get a copy of 8088 MS-DOS that has been hacked just enough to boot, so Bill Gates could get his picture in Infoworld. :-) The debugger supplied doesn't even know about the 386 32 bit registers or opcodes! The "386/286" version of MS-DOS that really uses the hardware is a year away also. Same thing for XENIX-386 from Microsoft, which will be available to OEM's sometime in 1987. (See Microsoft announcements in Infoworld for their estimates.) Now when the 68030 part becomes available and is put in a system, golly gee, it should work with little or no hacking, and all the assemblers and compilers out there will already work with those 32 bit instructions and registers. All of the operating systems out there might, at worst, have to be recompiled. Sure, the assemblers and compilers might be modified to take advantage of any new instructions that pop up, but from what I read, most of the new items are for supervisor mode, so you wouldn't put too many of them in the compiler. So you have the 68030 with a long lead-time till the hardware is available, but a short (or non-existant) port time for software, and the 386 which is relatively available now, but has a long lead-time to get any software (to say nothing of a real 386 assembler or compiler) that actually uses more than the 8/16 bit part of the CPU. How soon are Lotus and DBase going to report their packages to use 32-bit mode? When you compare the point when you get a functional system that actually USES the power you paid for, the 68030 and 386 are really tied, with more risk of delay on the 386 side because EVERYTHING has to be recompiled (even awk) to take advantage of the 32 bit arch. (I don't know a single XENIX/UNIX programmer who isn't ready to recode his/her stuff WITHOUT segments!) On the 68030, application programs should not have to do anything to take advantage of the performance boost. "Thank you, Uh Clem." Frank Durda IV @ The 386 is a registered trademark (I guess) of Intel Corp and not NEC or IBM. The 68030 is a registered trademark (should be patented too :-)) of Motorola and comes from Austin, which is nearer to "Where the best begins", Ft. Worth.