CompuServe Messages

> Speaking of the '060, have you heard a rumor that they(motorola) > won't be releasing it after all because it could outperform a > powerMac w/ native apps, when put in an old quadra running 680×0 > native software. I heard it and am hoping it is not true. But > I am afraid it is. 🙁 That is very untrue. The '060 is shipping in limited quanities at 50Mhz. It is due to ship at 66Mhz in Q1 95. The delays in shipping come from two reasons: 1) Moto has had a lot of trouble getting the clocks up on the 68K family since the '040 days. Remember how late the '040 was? Remember how long the clock was stuck at 25Mhz? There was no PPC chip then to explain it all away with. 🙂 2) Moto has probably shifted a lot of R&D money/people into PPC. That's were the money is. Not politics, just money. What the PPC offered to Moto was the chance to start over with a clean slate. It let them dump a lot of baggage that the 68K family brings. Things like: 1) Addressing modes which no one uses, but consume chip resources. 2) Variable length instructions, which slow decode and make the instruction fetch more complex. 3) Primitive condition code handling (ALU flags), which provide bottle necks to super scalar execution. These things are not to say the 68060 is not a really good chip, but it's too little, too late for it. As for the claim that the 68060 runs software faster than the PPC runs it's native software, that is simply not true. At the same clock (50Mhz) both chips are similar for integer, with the PPC slightly ahead. The PPC _smokes_ the '060 for floating point work. But here's the kicker…. Nobody uses 50Mhz PPC's!!!!! While the chips are comparable at the same clock, the PPC601 is shipping at 100Mhz today. The _low_ end in Mac's is 60Mhz, next month the low end goes to 66Mhz, in May it goes to 80Mhz. Today the high end is 110Mhz! Bu may that will be 120 or 130Mhz. It's just easier to get the clock frequencys up on the PPC then the 68K, so this disparity will continue to grow. As a further example, Moto started shipping the next generation PPC two months ago. The PowerPC 604 is 60% faster than the 601 at the same clock. This means that it's lowest speed of 100Mhz it is as fast as a 160Mhz 601. That would mean that a '060 would have to be about 160Mhz also to be comparable. I doubt you will ever see one that fast. That puts that chip at about 3 times faster than the shipping '060. Now the same failings that apply to the '060 apply to the PPC. In ten years (about the life of an architecture), PPC supports will disbelive that the "new" generations of chips are better and it will take two or three years to prove that the PPC is just old news. Oh well. Could be worse, could be raining…. —– Andrew