Re: Future //

[Liam Busey <buseyl@my-deja.com>]

**** **** wrote:
> 
> Roy,
>     I don't want to be mean, and I say this only to save your friend > time and effort. He should give up on the 68060 completely. Motorola > still runs the occasional batch of them, so it is still technically in > production, but volume is so low, it might as well be carved out of > gold.

Agreed. There invaluable to Amiga and Atari ST accelerator products but
they don't make sense as an emulation cpu.


>     Now, as far as the 040 is concerned, this is a chip that I would
> encourage him to use if he thinks he has reason, it is modern in its 
> own right, and its not missing much at all that the 060 has. Besides, > if he needs one, and can't find it, I think I have a few to salvage. 
> The 040's, being used in older macs, show up all over the place, and 
> I'm pretty sure that at least in the mac, they were socketed to allow > for 40slc's of the full cpu+fpu. He'll never have trouble finding this > chip, unless he wants high volume.

The 68k line is relatively low powered and at an evolutionary dead end
(is coldfire 68k?). The only benefit to using them is that Roy's friend
appears to experienced with them. I am not confident that '40 Macs will
be around much longer do to the rabid obsolecense of Macs over the past
3 years. 



>     If he thinks there is any commercial viability though, I'd > encourage him to move on to the PPC now. I understand that it would be > much more complex, at a time that he feels he needs practice with > something simpler, but it's the only sensible approach. I can't quote > exact prices, but in any posible volume, the ppc will cost half as > much as the 060, easy. And while he can salvage the 040 to his heart's > content, finding more than 1 or 2 at a time will be a thankless task.
>     Motorola might send him a sample PPC, as far as that goes, as long > as he pretends to be in business. Doubtful that they would for the 060 > though.

Roy, has your friend ever considered using a CPU from ARM family of RISC
chips (www.arm.com)? Supposedly the family came into existence because
Acorn computer wanted a next generation 65xxx CPU for their BBC Micro
but were dissatisfied with what was on the market. If this is accurate,
the ARM could be seen as a descendant of the 6502 just like the 65816.
Your buddy could implement 6502 and 65816 emulators in software and just
use native mode for 32 bit operations.

 
> PS He's gonna have trouble getting the 65816 too. WDC is playing hard > to get.

Didn't they just want a couple month of lead time for large orders?
Seeing as they don't fab their own chips wouldn't this be no surprise?

Liam Busey