The benefits of upgrading Motorola 68020-based machines to the company’s new MC68030 processor, due out by the end of the year, is being called into doubt by manufacturers as competition from RISC chips, not least from Motorola itself, mounts. Despite Motorola’s claim that the 68030 offers twice the performance of its predecessor many hardware manufactu-rers are predicting a true increase of around 20%. More serious is the charge that the 68030’s integrated memory management unit will lose performance advantages gained by manufacturers using their own optimised memory managers. Dr Mike King from benchMark Technologies, speaking at the Computer Graphics Show at Wembley this week said companies such as Convergent Technologies have implemented the 68020 with their own MMU far more efficiently than Motorola. Of course you can by-pass the 68030’s MMU, but then it is just like buying a 68020. BenchMark is promising a product based on the new generation MC78000 RISC chip by December of this year, as well as machines using the AMDV 29000 and NatSemi 32532 processors. Also at the Computer Graphics Show Silicon Graphics’ UK Managing Director Tim Marlton said that Silicon Graphics would be unlikely to use the 68030, but was instead looking to extend the MIPS Computer Systems technolo gy of its high-end boxes downwards.
