Motorola Inc yesterday finally launched the long-promised 68060 follow-on to the 68040, claiming that it matches the performance of the Intel Corp Pentium at less than half the price – it costs $263 at 50MHz when you order 10,000 or more and will sample next month. It is also claimed to deliver twice the performance of the 68040 at the same clock speed, the extra speed being achieved by use of a superscalar design with dual four-stage integer pipelines. That means that the chip has two complete integer arithmetic-logic units side by side, with the instruction stream being split into two and the two halves being executed in parallel. The part is claimed to deliver 100 MIPS peak at 50MHz – a figure arrived at by simple arithmetic; it is a peak performance because at times, one instruction stream will be halted while it waits for an answer it needs to come out of the other side. It includes 8Kb instruction cache, 8Kb data cache and 256-entry branch cache. It comes in 50MHz and 66MHz versions runs off a 3.3V power supply where the 68040 requires 5V, and with the 68000 family out of favour as a CPU these days, it is aimed primarily at embedded applications that require high-speed computation, input-output and data movement performance, such as communications and graphics-oriented applications – high-speed printing, image processing and real-time simulation. There are also cheaper 68LC060 and 68EC060 variants of the new part, which omit the memory manager, and both the memory manager and the floating point unit; they cost $169 and $150 respectively for 10,000-up.
