The Motorola 88110 RISC is not actually out yet, but the company’s Computer Group has had enough of third parties announcing new machines using its parent’s chips long before it gets a crack at them, and the company is first out of the gate with a single-board computer using the forthcoming 50MHz 88110. The MVME197 VMEbus single board computer is aimed at OEM customers requiring Fibre Digital Data Interface, Ethernet, SCSI and graphics interfaces. Motorola rates the new board at 70 Specmarks on the Specmark89 benchmark, which reflects both integer and floating point performance – about three times the performance of the comparable 88100-based MVME187 board. It runs Unix System V/88 4.0, and according to Electronic News, has 121 components, down from 134 on the predecessor board. This is achieved with six new applications-specific circuits, one of which is a bus switch that converts the 32-bit data bus of local peripherals designed for 68040 systems to the 88110’s 64-bit system bus. The company is offering the board with 32Mb of memory at $10,000 in sample quantities; it’s out now.Data General Corp hopes to have 88110-based AViiONs out by the end of the year, but has forborn to preannounce them ahead of time.
