THE 68060

By Seth Stroh

The 68060 will be available to developers in the first quarter of 1994 (from what I read they will have them before that time so that they can have products that use the 68060 available for sale in the first quarter of 1994). The price is supposed to be something like $500 per chip! That's a bit expensive so let me tell you what it can do;

68060 has the ability to execute more than one instruction per clock cycle due to two parallel instruction pipelines for integer instruction and also a third pipeline for floating point instructions. The chip also has the ability to do branch prediction to increase speed even more.

The 060 will be available at 50Mhz (resulting in a performance of 77Mips and 10Mflops) and also a 66Mhz (resulting in a performance of 102Mips and 14Mflops). An interesting thing to note is that that is the performance with current software (developed with compilers that are unaware of the 68060) because the chip is designed to execute multiple instructions per clock cycle it would be possible to increase the Mips rating by changing compilers so that they could take advantage of this feature. If code was written to take advantage of this ability it may be possible to get up to 100Mips from the 50Mhz chip and 130Mips from the 66Mhz.

There have also been some rumours that stated that Motorola would also produce a 100Mhz version of the chip but that is only a rumour as far as I know.

Some other features of the 060 are dual 8K cache, 0.5 micron static cmos allowing for lower heat operation and the ability for the chip to run from a 3.3 volt power supply in notebook type computers The Intel Pentium is based on older 0.8 micron and does not have these features. Also the Pentium requires more transistors on chip to remain compatibility with earlier Intel chips which adds to the heat problem. The Pentium has something like 3.2 million transistors with larger 0.8 micron spacing and the 060 gets the same performance with 2 million transistors and tighter 0.5 micron spacing. The closer you get the transistors together and the fewer you have the lower the operating temp. of the chip AND the higher the frequency you can run the clock at.

It seems there is some discrepancy in the MFlops you're going to get out of one. Well from what I gather, no one but Motorola really knows for sure, but you'll get anywhere from 10-16 MFlops for the 50 Mhz 060 and 14-20 MFlops for to 66 Mhz 060, depending on your compiler and a lot of other things. Either way, its going to make one hell of an Amiga.

One more thing, the Pentium has 8 32bit integer registers and 8 64bit floating point register. The 060 has 16 32bit integer registers and 16 64bit floating point registers. What this means is that Intel still sucks and that Motorola is still awesome!

End.


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