Although there has been no word yet from Motorola Inc’s Semiconductor division about the availability of its next generation MC68040 microprocessor, another division of the company, Motorola Computer Systems, says it will have 68040 beta release boards as early as next February. So far, only a brief data sheet on the 15 MIPS, 4 MFLOPS processor has been issued: it is said to integrate integer and floating point units into a single chip that include one million active devices (CI No 917). Motorola also said it would be ready to announce products based on the Motorola 88000 RISC chip by year-end, including 17 MIPS boards in November that could be plugged into existing Motorola hardware. Full applications binary interface specifications for 68000 and 88000 users will be complete by January 1989, said marketing manager John Shouler, who claimed that Motorola Computer Systems was now the fifth largest supplier of Unix boxes to the European market.
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