Motorola Inc must sometimes get the feeling that it threw the baby out with the bathwater when it allowed future versions of the 68000 microprocessor family to trickle down the drain after it was seduced by the apparent charms of the PowerPC. Rather wistfully, the company’s Motorola Computer Group has finally built the last of the line, the 68060 into a VMEbus single board computer, the MVME172. Neglect of the 68060 is highlighted by the fact that the fastest version available on the new board is clocked at a mere 64MHz. The new MVME172 board is claimed to offer approximately three times the processing performance of the 68040-based MVME162, claimed to be the best-selling VME board in 1996 – so much for the PowerPC-based VME boards. Identical input- output and connector configurations enable existing MVME162 systems to be upgraded to the new board without any change to chassis or cabling. It supports IndustryPack mezzanine board input-output expansion for a wide range of process control and industrial automation applications at speeds of up to 32MHz with direct memory access, with 16M of parity dynamic RAM, 64Mb of error code correction dynamic RAM and 2Mb of Flash memory. The board provides either two or four IndustryPack sites. Pricing for the new board is from under $2,000 in OEM quantities.
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