Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!aurora!labrea!decwrl!decvax!tektronix!orca!stank From: stank@orca.TEK.COM (Stan Kalinowski) Newsgroups: comp.sys.m68k Subject: Re: The New Chips (really 8088 emulation on the 68020) Message-ID: <2474@orca.TEK.COM> Date: 2 Feb 88 22:08:05 GMT References: <4746@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1430@husc2.UUCP> <4227@utai.UUCP> <9342@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> Reply-To: stank@orca.UUCP (Stan Kalinowski) Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR Lines: 31 Keywords: Intel IBM I don't want to get into the Intel vs Motorola holy wars, but I'd like to comment about 8088 emulation on the 68020. (By the way, my personal view on that Intel vs Motorola thing is this: A mature software engineer learns to exploit any hardware architecture to it's full advantage, it's up to the hardware engineers to provide an architecture that closly supports the application.) >In article <4227@utai.UUCP> tjhorton@ai.UUCP (Timothy J. Horton) writes: . . . >the 68k, which was one point in its favor. Contrary to what you >may have heard, the 68000 can not emulate an 8080 or 8086 at >anything approaching native speed. I'm told that the 68020 can, >but I have yet to see it demonstrated. The 68000 just isn't >significantly faster than the 8086 (look at 68000 benchmarks, >not 68020). Basically, I agree that a 68000 probably cannot emulate an 8086 without some sort of hardware assistance. Right now Tektronix offers an IBM PC emulator, called SoftPc, that runs on our new 43xx series 68020 workstations. Basically, an image of an IBM monitor pops up in an X window and you can type dos commands on the keyboard. The 43xx workstation employs a 20 Mhz 68020 and I'm told that the SoftPc emulator runs the PC magazine benchmarks just slightly faster than the 4.77 MHz PC. I don't know much about the internal workings of SoftPc so I can'c comment on the possibility of speeding it up. -- US Mail: Stan Kalinowski, Tektronix, Inc. Information Display Group, Graphics Workstations Division PO Box 1000, MS 61-028, Wilsonville OR 97070 Phone:(503)-685-2458 uucp: {ucbvax,decvax,ihnp4,allegra,uw-beaver}!tektronix!orca!stank