Samples of Motorola’s next generation MC68030 32-bit microprocessor are available now, with production quantities promised for the fourth quarter. Announced a year ago, and developed at the company’s Austin, Texas plant, the chip saw first silicon on April 16 1987, Motorola reports. It is now seeing first silicon on the MC68882 enhanced floating point co- processor. Although wary of giving the chip a MIPS rating, the company says it should provide up to twice the performance of the MC68020, while retaining 100% upward compatibility with the complete 68000 family, which, says Motorola, represents a $2,000m base of 32-bit software. Performance improvements are attributed to its high degree of parallelism; the chip uses a Harvard-style architecture providing dual internal data and address buses. The 68030 has an on-chip instruction cache and on-chip data cache, improved bus interface, and on-chip paged memory management unit. The firm has not yet priced the 68030.
