Motorola Inc is planning to introduce its answer to Intel Corp’s 80860 RISC today, claiming that the Motorola 96002 is much faster than the Intel part for multi-media applications combining colour video, graphics and stereo sound. The company claims that over 150 customers worldwide have asked for samples of the co-processor, but according to the Wall Street Journal, observers believe that the company has lost a large part of the potential market by not offering the part until a year after the Intel RISC became available. Motorola claims floating point performance of 165 MFLOPS against 99 MFLOPS for the 80860, has separate input and output buses, and highlights the fact that it is much cheaper – $750 for samples, which is 65% of the price of the Intel part in volume. Ariel Corp of Highland Park, New Jersey is said to have used it to build a board for personal computers that handles sound and moving video data.
