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Author Topic: Motorola 68060  (Read 2448 times)

Weaver

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Motorola 68060
« on: January 26, 2018, 12:40:57 AM »

I would just love to own a 68060 system. No idea about what hardware precisely. Could presumably get *nix to build for it?
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burakkucat

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Re: Motorola 68060
« Reply #1 on: January 26, 2018, 01:10:28 AM »

My initial Unix experience was on systems with the Motorola 68000 processor. The processor card and memory card(s) plugged into a DEC Q-bus back-plane. All other peripherals were connected via Emulex controller cards which were also connected to the Q-bus.

I can remember the arrival of the 68010 and later the 68020 but then my memory goes blank . . . 
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Weaver

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Re: Motorola 68060
« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2018, 01:57:39 AM »

68030 and even 68040 were used in the Mac. There was some kind of Atari system with a 68030 in it. The 68020 was fully 32-bit with some architectural improvements, irritating limits of 16-bit displacements in register plus displacement addressing were fixed, as I remeber that doing position-independent code was a nightmare on a 68000, having to see if 16-bit signed displacements would stretch and doing horrible arithmetic if not. The 68000 VM didn't work properly because of architectural bugs to do with instruction restartability iirc. The 68010 fixed that and effectively added the first block move 'instruction' by having a hardware recogniser for an instruction pair (an ancient precursor to macro-op fusion [eg cmp-jump fusion] but the latter is at the microarchitecture level) but did little else. 68020s were slow, 68030s were better, 68040s were screaming fast and iirc had floating point. The rare 68060 was a twin pipeline device. Can't remember if it was also out-of-order.
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Weaver

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Re: Motorola 68060
« Reply #3 on: January 26, 2018, 02:03:02 AM »

I remeber reading about the 68000 in summer 1981 and a friend got hold of a development board. I remember my amazement at being told that you could do even better than 16MB of RAM on its 24-bit address bus, because you could use the F.C. pins to give you code-vs-data and user-vs-supervisor spaces. So the possibility of brilliant security even back then. Puts shame in the current (topical) guilty parties who have let user mode code read supervisor address space on some systems.

It would be very cool to benchmark the ultimate 68000 monster.

I had two Ataris, a 1MB one and a 4MB one with hd and a dumb (thank goodness) laser printer. The missus used to do music DTP and other vector graphics stuff on the latter machine in the cellar in london which was rather damp and musty and containing the occasional dead rat killed by Daisy my siamese pedigree girl crossed with a silver tabby to produce a very oriental moggy.

Have never owned a 68k Mac or any other later ‘Mac’.
« Last Edit: January 26, 2018, 02:07:18 AM by Weaver »
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phi2008

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Re: Motorola 68060
« Reply #4 on: January 26, 2018, 06:59:05 PM »

I would guess you'll end up with a machine with a 68060 accelerator board - so here's a link to a 50MHz Amiga 68060 board/128MB RAM for £390(though not in stock currently). Did any mainstream manufacturer use it? Motorola were miles behind Intel by the time the 68060 came out.
« Last Edit: January 26, 2018, 07:08:30 PM by phi2008 »
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Weaver

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Re: Motorola 68060
« Reply #5 on: January 28, 2018, 02:47:50 AM »

Iirc from the wikipedia article it got used in a few non-mainstream applications but as you say, it was all too late.

Quote
The 68060 has a history in American broadcast television graphics. Chyron's iNFiNiT!, Max!, and Maxine! series of television character generators use the 68060 as the main processor. These character generators were a fixture on many American television networks' affiliate stations.

In desktops, the 68060 is used in some variants of the Amiga 4000T produced by Amiga Technologies, and available as a third party upgrade for other Amiga models. It is also used in the Amiga clone DraCo non-linear video system.

The Q60 extended the Sinclair QL design similarly from the slowest start to the ultimate pace of the 68K architecture's capabilities; these 68060-based motherboards — at 66 MHz for the full 68060 or a non-FPU 68LC060 option overclocked to 80 MHz — are more than 100 times faster than the Sinclair QL while running the same operating systems.

The 68060 is used in Nortel Meridian 1 Option 51, 61 and 81 large office PBX systems, powering the CP3 and CP4 core processor boards. A pair of these boards each sporting a 68060 could be used to make the PBX fault tolerant. This was a logical application as previous Meridian 1 cores used other Motorola chips. Nortel has since changed the architecture to use Intel processors.

The Motorola Vanguard 6560 multiprotocol router uses a 50 MHz 68EC060 processor.

Motorola MVME-17x and Force Computer SYS68K VMEbus systems use a 68060 CPU.

Reference.

[Moderator edited to merge the two posts and add the reference link.]
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 07:59:19 PM by burakkucat »
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