Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!apple!baum
From: baum@Apple.COM (Allen J. Baum)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: '040 vs. SPARC (was: Next computer...)
Message-ID: <38415@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 7 Feb 90 18:02:06 GMT
References: <8905@portia.Stanford.EDU> <160@zds-ux.UUCP>
Reply-To: baum@apple.UUCP (Allen Baum)
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 24

[]
>In article <160@zds-ux.UUCP> gerry@zds-ux.UUCP (Gerry Gleason) writes:
>Has anyone seen a 68040?  I thought not.  You are comparing
>a chip that won't ship until this summer with one that is in
>a machine that has been in production for some time.  This
>occurs over and over in the RISC/CISC debate, but that doesn't
>seem to keep people from making these silly comparison's.

I'm afraid that I have to   agree   with this one. The '040 has hit
silicon, but you're still comparing a 1.2million transistor chip,
with built-in caches, to a much smaller chip (how many transistors in
the Cypress SPARC, anyone know?) 

It is still very significant that the are claiming to be faster AT THE SAME
COLCK RATE. It also took them a few more years to build the complex chip
that would do that- not an easy task, even with the extra time. The Moto
folks appear to have done a very nice job on the design of this chip.

We still need to wait for real benchmarks. Anyone planning SPECmarks for
the '040?

--
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