#Motorola Unveils 68060
19-Apr-94 01:11:37
Sb: #139706-#Motorola Unveils 68060
Fm: Steve Ahlstrom 76703,2006
To: Black Belt Systems 76004,1771
It appears the 250 million ops is correct … here is a much more detailed
story from PRNewswire …
04/18 0736 MOTOROLA UNVEILS 32-BIT 68060 PRODUCT LINE OF …
– Motorola's (NYSE: MOT) High Performance Microprocessor Division today
formally introduced the 68060 product line of microprocessors. The first
generation of the 68060 product line consists of the 68060, 68LC060 and
68EC060. The announcement of the 68060 marks a revolutionary high-point in the
evolution of Motorola's 68000 Family. Leveraging many of the same performance
enhancements used by RISC designs as well as providing innovative
architecturial techniques, the 68060 harnesses new levels of performance for
the 68000 Family. Key benefits such as hardware and software compatibility
with 68040 designs, cost-effective memory systems requirements and an extremely
power efficient architecture makes the 68060 an ideal processor choice for a
broad range of networking/communication, telecommunication and control
applications. With 68000 Family code compatibility, the 68060 provides a range
of upgrade opportunities to virtually any existing 68040 application.
Incorporating 2.5 million transistors on a single piece of silicon, the
68060 employs a deep pipeline, dual issue superscaler execution, a branch
cache, a high performance floating point unit, 8 Kbytes each of on-chip
instruction and data caches and on-chip demand paging memory management units
(MMUs). It allows simultaneous execution of two integer instructions (or an
integer and a float instruction) and one branch instruction during each clock
period. All integer arithmetic or logical instructions are able to perform an
embedded load/store operation making the 68060 capable of simultaneously
processing up to 250 million operations per second at 50-MHz. The 68060
delivers an average performance level of 90 VAX MIPS at 50-MHz.
"The introduction of the 68060 affirms Motorola's commitment to the ongoing
success of the 68000 Family and our willingness and ability to field
competitive product technology," said Cal Gooden, director of operations,
Motorola High Performance MPU Division. "Outstanding performance for
cost-constrained systems makes the 68060 microprocessor an ideal choice for
embedded applications. We are pleased to have such customers as Force
Computers, Heurikon, Motorola Computer Group and Wellfleet be the first
supporting the 68060."
Scalable Superscalar Architecture Employing high-level synthesizable
modeling, coupled with strict partitioning of functionality, the 060 represents
a platform for the proliferation of high-performance embedded computing. The
first generation of the 060 product line are distinguished by the use of dual
integer pipelines, dedicated branching unit, optional floating point processor
and the rich instruction-set of the 68040 architecture. The 060 can be easily
modified for higher performance implementations as well as provide
substantially cost-reduced versions through the manipulation of the 060's
high-level model.
Pursuing a strategy of re-use and incremental improvement, Motorola expects
to rapidly deploy the 060 technology to a wide range of price/performance
points.
The 68060 features a full internal Harvard architecture. The instruction
and data caches are designed to support concurrent instruction fetch and
operand read and operand write references on every clock cycle. Separate 8
Kbyte instruction and 8 Kbyte data caches can be frozen to prevent allocation
over time-critical code or data. The independent nature of the caches allows
instruction-stream fetches, data- stream fetches and external accesses to occur
simultaneously with instruction execution. The operand data cache is four-way
banked to permit simultaneous read and write access in each clock.
A very high bandwidth internal memory system coupled with the compact nature
of the 68000 Family code allows the 060 to achieve extremely high levels of
performance even when operating from low-cost memory such as a 32-bit wide DRAM
memory system.
Instructions are fetched from the internal cache or external memory by a
four stage instruction fetch pipeline. The 68060 variable-length instruction
system is internally decoded into a fixed length representation and channeled
into an instruction buffer. The instruction buffer acts as a FIFO which
provides a decoupling mechanism between the instruction fetch unit and the
operand execution units. Fixed Format Instructions are dispatched to dual
four-stage pipelined RISC operand execution engines where they are then
executed.
In addition to the performance gains from this superscalar execution
architecture, a brand cache plays a major role in achieving the high
performance levels of the 68060. The branch cache has been implemented such
that most branches are executed in zero cycles. Using a technique known as
branch folding, the branch cache allows the instruction fetch pipeline to
detect and change the instruction prefetch stream before the change of flow
affects the instruction execution engines, minimizing the need for pipeline
refill.
The 68060 Product Line Features and Performance The first generation 68060
product line offers three versions. The 68060, 68LC060 and the 68EC060 differ
in the feature offerings only. All three microprocessors offer a performance
level of over 100 MIPS at 66-MHz. The 68060 comes fully equipped with both an
FPU and MMU for high-end embedded control and desktop applications. For cost
sensitive embedded control and desktop applications where designers need an MMU
but don't want to pay for an FPU, the 68LC060 offers high-performance at a low
cost. Specifically designed for low-cost embedded control applications the
68EC060 comes without both the FPU and MMU permitting designers to leverage
68060 performance while avoiding the cost of unnecessary features.
Power Management In addition to substantial cost and performance benefits,
the 060 also offers advantages in power consumption and power management. The
68060 automatically minimizes power dissipation by using a fully- static
design, dynamic power management and low voltage operation. Each stage of the
integer unit pipelines and the FPU pipeline draws power only when an
instruction is executing and the cache arrays draw power only when an access is
made. Explicitly the 68060 power consumption can be controlled from the
operating system. For example, the 060 includes a low-power stop instruction
(LPSTOP) that shuts down the active circuits in the processor, halting
instruction execution and greatly reducing power consumption. Although the
68060 operates at a lower operating voltage, it interfaces to both 3V and 5V
peripherals and logic.
To assist in product design, a broad base of established development tools
is available for the 68060 including: applications, assemblers, compilers,
debuggers, languages, operating systems and real-time kernels. Note that the
accompanying 68060 third party developer support news release explicitly
outlines the tool offering.
The 50-MHz 68060, 68LC060, and 68EC060 are currently sampling to alpha and
beta sites. General samples will be available for both the 50- MHz and 66-MHz
68060 by 3Q94. Production for the 50-MHz 68060 is slated to start in late
3Q94. While production for the 66-MHz 68060 will begin in late 4Q94.
The 50-MHz 68060 is priced at $263 in quantities of 10,000. The 68LC060 and
the 68EC060 are priced at $169 and $150 in quantities of 10,000 respectively.
Having 1993 worldwide sales of $5.7 billion, Motorola's Semiconductor
Products Sector is the largest U.S.-based broad line supplier of
semiconductors, with a balanced portfolio of more than 50,000 devices. Motorola
is one of the world's leading providers of wireless communications,
semiconductors, and advanced electronic systems and services. Major equipment
businesses include cellular telephone, two-way radio, paging and data
communications, personal communications, automotive, defense and space
electronics and computers. Communication devices, computers and millions of
consumer products are powered by Motorola semiconductors. Motorola's 1993
sales were $17 billion.
-0- 4/18/94 /CONTACT: Kathleen Kenney or Samantha
Rutherford of Cunningham Communication, 617-494-8202; or Tom Spohrer of
Motorola, 512-891-2917/
(MOT) CO: Motorola, Inc. ST: Texas IN: CPR SU: PDT