The hot new 96002 floating-point dual port processor from Motorola Inc’s Microprocessor Products Group based in Austin, Texas (CI No 1,424, 1,425) is the first member of a family of 32-bit floating-point processors based on the same architecture as Motorola’s 56001 24-bit fixed-point processor. The chip is dubbed the Media Engine because of its ability to create colour graphics concurrently with generation of stereo sound. The 96002 is designed as an attached processor, supplementing central processing units such as Motorola’s own 68040 or its rival Intel’s 80486. It initially comes with clock speeds of 33MHz and 27MHz, and the 33MHz 96002 has a claimed peak performance of 50 MFLOPS and 16.7 MIPS. A 40MHz version is promised for the first half of 1991 providing more than 60 MFLOPS and 20 MIPS. However, Motorola says that MIPS does not provide a good standard of comparison as the 96002 instruction is of the very long instruction word class – an approach that was thought to have died with Multiflow Computers Inc. With a single instruction, the 96002 can perform a multiplication, an addition, a subtraction, two move operations, a direct memory access transfer and four source and destination address calculations. In a RISC processor, this sequence would require three or more instructions. The 96002 Media Engine is a new type of processor, capable of handling what was once a disparate array of applications which required multi-chip implementations. It designed to handle graphics and sound through two basic features: it is a deterministic processor, giving results at precisely the expected moment, which is ideal for generating compact disk quality sound or imaging; it also provides a high performance floating point engine to drive non-real time applications such as graphics. The 96002 is primarily targeted at applications such as three dimensional colour graphics, compact disk quality sound, photo imaging, colour laser printing and scientific applications such as weather forecasting, radar and sonar. From an architectural standpoint, the 96002 is essentially a 32-bit floating-point version of Motorola’s 24-bit 56001 – the audio and communications processor in Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer. The floating-point engine was added to the 96002 specifically to handle high-resolution, moving, shaded and three dimensional graphics and imaging algorithms.
Dual-port architecture
The 96002 contains more than 750,000 transistors and its architecture contains a variety of ports, buses, memories and execution units all working in parallel. Each processing unit within the chip is arranged in a symmetrical layout, giving the 96002 an ability to complete 10 operations – multiplications or data transfers – per instruction cycle. At 33MHz, the 96002 processes up to 10 operations every 60nS. Motorola claims that a unique feature of the chip is that it contains two identical independent input-output ports on opposite sides of the chip. This dual port architecture effectively doubles the 96002’s throughput or productivity over conventional processors. The 96002 has a throughput of 132Mbps which is the equivalent of moving a 66,000 page report on and off the chip in one second. The dual port architecture also makes the 96002 ideal for applications requiring multiprocessor configurations. Special circuitry is embedded in the chip which enables multiple 96002s to be connected togther like railway carriages with no interface circuitry. The 96002 is sampling now and is beta testing with several major computer manufacturers. More than 100 customers have designed in the 96002 and are awaiting samples. Volume production is expected in the third quarter of 1990. OEM computer and accelerator board announcements using the 96002 are expected within 1990. Initial sampling price is $750 in single chip quantities (33MHz version). The 27MHz version is $650 in single chip quantities. Substantial price cuts are promised when the part become available in volume. Ariel Corp, Highland Park, New Jersey has rushed out a co-processor board for AT-alikes using the 96002. The
MM-96 with one 96002 and 1Mb memory is $4,000; memory goes to 16Mb and dual processor versions are from $6,000. Ariel says it has them now.
