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From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.sys.m68k,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: The New Chips
Message-ID: <9312@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jan 88 19:37:56 GMT
References: <4746@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1430@husc2.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 54

In article <1430@husc2.UUCP> sipples@husc2.UUCP (Timothy Sipples) writes:
...

| Anyway, the Motorola 68030 is now state-of-the-art, with the
| 68040 announced.  If you are inquiring about benchmark results,
| I don't know of any direct comparisons between the 68030 and the
| 80386.  However, according to Byte and other sources, the
| Motorola family now outpaces the Intel family in most tests. 
| The microprocessor wars continue, however, with Intel supposedly
| working on an 80486.  [Caveat: benchmarks are sometimes
| misleading.]

	I ran some benchmarks of my own on a 16MHz 80386 (1ws)
and a Sun 3/280S (25MHz 68020, ?ws). I would have to say that
the results were inconclusive, at best. The 68881 was better at
transendental functions, but inferior in simple floating
arithmetic. 32 bit int was better on the Sun, even after
correction for the clock speeds.

	The 80386 machine did not have cache, the Sun (I'm told)
does. On another 80386 I measured 25% improvement with cache on.
Cache is not quite as good as 0ws memory, but it does halp a
lot.

	I concluded that the 80386 machines were available in a
useful configuration at a much lower price than the 68020
machines I have seen. This doesn't claim that the 80386 is
*inherently* cheaper, although that may be true due to less
stringent memory requirements.

	Current price for a small 80386 UNIX system is about $4k
for 2MB memory, UNIX runtime and C, 40MB hard drive, mono
display. I was unable to find a 68020 based system with a
similar configuration which is available for less than ~$5600 to
the end user. I didn't count discounts on either type of
machine.

	The 80386 allows running MS-DOS programs under UNIX. No
matter what your opinion of MS-DOS, there is a lot of good,
cheap, software available for it, and many people would rather
have the option than not. Witness that there are DOS cards for
the Amiga, ATT 7300, Sun, etc.

	The 68030 has a modified Harvard archetecture, and
splits the data and code internally, using a separate cache for
each and multiplexing bus to the outside world. I'm not
qualified to say that this is/isn't better than having one big
external cache on an 80386.

	Any detailed discussion of details belongs in comp.arch.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me