Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: 68020 vs. 68030 speed (was Re: 80486 vs. 68040 code size)
Message-ID: <1989May19.163917.1025@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <4229@ficc.uu.net> <6924@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19 May 89 16:39:17 GMT

In article <6924@cbmvax.UUCP> daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes:
>> Probably. I've never had the opportunity to use or even see a 32000-based
>> machine, unfortunately. Is the problem market timing, the prestige of the
>> people who started Sun, or what?
>
>I think the problem was the first 32ks ... were kinda wimpy as
>compared to the existing 680x0s at the time...

The problem was not so much wimpiness, as the state of the bug list.  Ugh.
Choke.  Barf.  The first 32ks looked okay on paper but were a disaster area
in silicon.  And National took so long fixing them that almost everybody
lost interest.  At the beginning they were a bit behind, but had a fair
chance to pick up a significant share of the market if they'd had clean
silicon.  They, uh, didn't.  I'm told that they have cleaned up their act
quite a bit since, but that early stumble was so severe that it hasn't
done them a lot of good.
-- 
Subversion, n:  a superset     |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
of a subset.    --J.J. Horning | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu