CompuServe Messages

> It appears the 250 million ops is correct … here is a much more > detailed story from PRNewswire … It is _very_ important to note that this is burst speed, not sustained throughput. Also, MIPS mean _nothing_! Who cares how many instructions a second it can do? i.e. What does an instruction "do"? The SPECmark numbers would be more useful to compare with other systems. They need to release typical SPECint and SPECfloat. From the numbers I've seen, it is near or slightly ahead of the Pentium at similar clocks. It will certainly help current code run faster, but Moto has also been very quiet on what their plans are for CPUs beyond the '060. What happens in two years? Is there a future? Will Moto develop a follow on to the '060? They, of course, have spoken about variations of the '060, but not a single word about an '070 or '080. In the past they have _always_ talked about the next chip in the series. The "EE Times" ran a front page story about the '060 last week and they felt that Moto was aiming this chip at the embeded market. They noted that they introduced this chip at an embeded devices conference rather than a CPU conference. They also claim that Moto does not expect these to be in wide spread desktop use. They plan on PowerPC chips for that market Moto made the announcment yesterday of the 604 at 100Mhz which will ship in volume near the same time as the '060 and be _lots_ faster than any '060 shipping this year. (By a factor of almost two). As clocks go up the thing which will kill the '060 is the 32 bit data path to memory! This makes it pin compatible with the '040, but it will begin to starve for memory! Almost every other chip has at _least_ 64 bits to RAM. PowerPC, Pentium, Alpha, etc, all can move twice as much data per cycle as an '060 and they all have higher clocks to boot. What will '060 buiders do? Put $1000 40ns SIMMS in their machine? That'll win market share! The general feeling in "EE Times" and the "Microprocessor Report" is that '060, Pentium, and PowerPC601 are all about the same speed at the same clock. The problem is that Moto will ship a 66Mhz '060 late this year, just as P54C and 601 are getting to 100Mhz and _beyond_. The 604 being 50% faster at the same clock and _starting_ at 100Mhz won't help. (160 SPECint and 165 SPECfloat at 100Mhz!) Moto needs to clairify what they want with '060. Is it a midlevel CPU or a high end embeded controller? Either way, what will come next? It has taken _forever_ between the '040 and '060, will people have to wait that long for the next CPU? —- Andrew