[Coco] OT: Newfangled MM/1???

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 31 October 2006 17:04, John W. Linville wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 04:49:55PM -0500, Roger Merchberger wrote:
>> Per an advert in Linux Journal, I stumbled across this critter:
>>
>> http://www.emacinc.com/som/som100es.htm
>>
>> An 66/80 Mhz Dragonball (68K compatible) w/16Meg RAM & 4.5Meg Flash ROM
>> on an SO-DIMM stick.... with an available carrier board as well.
>
>Would an OSK kernel run on a Dragonball?  Aren't those processors
>missing some of the original 68k instructions?

My guess John, based on its speed, would be that they are getting the last 
good silicon out of the 68060 masks.  And while the 060 was a dual exec 
unit chip, some of its instruction set required emulation on the amiga's 
with an 060 board in them, by way of a seperate 68060.library that was 
called when the missing instruction trap was triggered.  Even that wasn't 
100% complete as when we were compiling our arexx srcs into standalone 
executables, there was one instruction the compiler used that we had to 
over-write with another work-alike before our code would run on the 68060 
equipt machines.  FWIW, the 68060 equipt machines were, given adequate 
cooling, very stable machines.  The average 68040 machine could beat it 
for uptime, but not by much, we often got a months uptime on busy 040/060 
machines, something that was unheard of for the 68000/68020/68030 
machines.

Its possible this dragonball might have only one execution unit in it too, 
so it might not be as fast as a full-blown 50mhz 68060.

>--
>John W. Linville
>linville at tuxdriver.com

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.