Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!apple!oracle!news
From: csimmons@jewel.oracle.com (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: '040 vs. SPARC (was: Next computer...)
Message-ID: <1990Feb11.060709.19020@oracle.com>
Date: 11 Feb 90 06:07:09 GMT
References: <38415@apple.Apple.COM> <8905@portia.Stanford.EDU> <160@zds-ux.UUCP>
Sender: news@oracle.com
Reply-To: csimmons@oracle.com
Organization: Oracle Corp
Lines: 33

In article <38415@apple.Apple.COM>, baum@Apple.COM (Allen J. Baum) writes:
> From: baum@Apple.COM (Allen J. Baum)
> Subject: '040 vs. SPARC (was: Next computer...)
> Date: 7 Feb 90 18:02:06 GMT
> 
> >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?) 
> --
> 		  baum@apple.com		(408)974-3385
> {decwrl,hplabs}!amdahl!apple!baum

While I am firmly a RISC bigot, there is a good CISC argument here.
When comparing the '040 and Sparc, you are not comparing a 1.2M
transistor chip with a 120K transistor chip.  In the 1.2M transistors
of the '040, there's an ALU, FPU, portions of a cache, and probably an
MMU.  For an accurate comparison, you'ld want to consider the Sparc chip
[ALU and portions of an MMU?], the FPU chip used with the Sparc, and
at least some of the transistors used to implement the off-chip Sparc
cache.

It has been suggested that when looked at in this light, the Sparc
uses just about as many transistors as the '040.

-- Chuck