user055 (AT) SPAMTRAP (DOT) net (Ni!!! ßó¶=+?á) wrote:

A fair criticism. But as I said a while back, I consider moving to a three screen
setup the best investment I've ever made, without a doubt. And it cost less
(including the vid card to drive it) than the first 17" CRT I bought.

So I'm pretty excited about this, even though Matrox probably aren't. :-)

Andrew McP

Ebola <user03z4 (AT) SPAMTRAP (DOT) net> wrote in
news:jqvla51n757f8tb1k7819n755h1j2m7pad (AT) 4ax (DOT) com:

made a competing CPU chip to Intel. the 6800 and 680x0 families. They
made the chip in the first Mac and the later ones - until they reached
about 100Mhz and 64bit. The Motorolla was actually a superior chip - flat
memory model, no 640K-1088K gap problem and internal address/memory busses
as wide as the external busses (unlike some of Intels pre-pentium chips),
but Intel had a larger market share. So Motorolla had to stop making the
chip. They didn't have enough profit to justify any more development.

On Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:19:58 -0700, Zygocactus wrote:
Dunno about yours but mine certainly were CISC cpu's, you may be
mixing them up with the later MIPS chips. 6809E was the first chip to
handle 16 bits in 2 cpu registers (powered my Dragon 64, that one ;-).

All the best,

Uwe

Uwe <uschuerkamp (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote in
news:h8l2mc$orh$1 (AT) news (DOT) eternal-september.org:

explicitly mentioned the actual CPU's involved. But nymshifting trolls
aren't terribly good at reading comprehension. They can't be.

Uwe wrote:

Cisc/Risc, it's all the same to me. FAIL.

APLer wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88000

History

Originally called the 78000 as a homage to their famed 68000 series, the
design went though a tortured development path, including the name
change, before finally emerging in April 1988.

In the late 1980s several companies were actively watching the 88000 for
future use, including NeXT, Apple Computer and Apollo Computer, but all
gave up by the time the 88110 was available in 1990.

There was an attempt to popularize the system with the 88open group,
similar to what Sun Microsystems was attempting with their SPARC design.
It appears to have failed in any practical sense.[1]

In the early 1990s Motorola joined the AIM effort to create a new RISC
design based on the IBM POWER design. They worked a few features of the
88000 into the new PowerPC design to offer their customer base some sort
of upgrade path. At that point the 88000 was dumped as soon as possible.[2]

[edit] Architecture

Like the 68000 before it, the 88000 was considered to be a very "clean"
design. It was a pure 32-bit load/store architecture, using separate
instruction and data caches (Harvard architecture), and separate data
and address buses. It had a small but powerful command set, and, like
all Motorola CPUs, did not use memory segmentation.

A major architectural mistake was that both integer instructions and
floating-point instructions used the same register file. This required
that the single register file to have sufficient read and write ports to
support both the integer execution unit and the floating-point unit. The
connections for each port is an additional capacitive load that must be
driven by register memory cell. This made it more difficult to build
high frequency superscalar implementations.

[edit] Implementations
Motorola 88100 RISC CPU

The first implementation of the 88000 design was in the 88100 CPU, which
included an integrated FPU. Mated to this was the 88200 MMU and cache
controller. The idea behind this splitting of duties was to allow
multiprocessor systems to be built more easily; a single 88200 could
support up to four 88100's. However, this also meant that building the
most basic system, with a single processor, required both chips and
considerable wiring between them, driving up costs. This is likely
another major reason for the 88000's limited success.
Motorola 88110 RISC CPU

This was later addressed in the superscalar 88110, which combined the
CPU, FPU, MMU, and L1 cache into a single package. An additional
modification, made at the behest of MIT's *T project, resulted in the
88110MP, including on-chip communications for use in multi-processor
systems.[3] A version capable of speeds up to 100 MHz was planned as the
88120, but was never built.

An implementation for embedded applications, the 88300, was under
development during the early 1990s, but was eventually cancelled. Ford
was the only design win, and they were offered a PowerPC design as a
replacement, which they accepted.

Though sometimes referred to as A88k, the Apollo PRISM is not related to
the Motorola 88000.[4]

[edit] Products and applications
MVME-197LE

Motorola released a series of single-board computers, known as the MVME
series, for building "out of the box" systems based on the 88000, as
well as the Series 900 stackable computers employing these MVME boards.
Unlike tower or rack mount systems, the Series 900 sat on top of each
other and connected to one another with bus-like cabling. The concept
never caught on.

NCD used the 88100 (without the 88200) in its 88K X-Terminals. The 88110
made it into some versions of a never released NeXT machine, the NeXT
RISC Workstation, but the project was canceled along with all NeXT
hardware projects in 1993. The 4-processor OMRON luna88k machines from
Japan used the m88k, and were used for a short time on the Mach kernel
project at Carnegie Mellon University. A number of similar smaller
systems were also built, but none are widely known.

In the embedded computer space, the "Tri-channel VMS Computer" in the
F-15_S/MTD used three 88000s in a triply-redundant computer.[5]

Major users were limited. The only widespread third-party computer use
would be in the Data General AViiON series. These were fairly popular,
and remain in limited use today. Encore Computer built their Encore-91
machine on the m88k, then introduced a completely ground-up redesign as
the Infinity 90 series, but it is unclear how many of these machines
were sold. In the early 1990s Northern Telecom used the 88100 and 88110
as the central processor in its DMS SuperNode family of telephone
switches. All of these users were forced to move to other processors
when Motorola later gave up on the m88k; DG went to Intel, Encore to the
Alpha.

GEC Computers used the 88100 to build the GEC 4310, one of the GEC 4000
series computers, but issues with memory management meant it didn't
perform as well as their earlier gate array based and Am2900 based GEC
4000 series computers, and no more GEC systems were design using the
88000 family.

Linotype-Hell used the 88110 in their "Power" workstations running the
DaVinci raster graphics editor for image manipulation.

Dolphin Server, a spin-off from the dying Norsk Data built servers based
on the 88k. Around 100 systems were shipped during 1988-1992.

mcp.andrew (AT) DELETTHISgmail (DOT) com (Andrew MacPherson) wrote:

Here's an entertaining look behind the scenes at Nvidia. ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR45ja_fNzU

Andrew McP

mcp.andrew (AT) DELETTHISgmail (DOT) com (Andrew MacPherson) wrote:

It also looks like ATI managed the flow of information pretty cleverly. The
implication was that an adapter (possibly a cheap one) might allow the use of a
third monitor. The official line now seems to be that this isn't the case. And the
chances of anyone having displayports on their existing monitors are roughly one in
a bazillion.

Nice card, good power consumption & performance, but pretty disappointing
multi-screen hype. Such is the nature of pre-release marketing I guess. Welcome to
the 21st century. :-)

Andrew McP

Andrew MacPherson wrote:

Unless you have one native Display Port (DP) monitor though you will
need an active DP-DVI adapter and those aren't cheap nor seemingly
available in the UK. Early adopters seem to be buying a new monitor...

The connectors are two DVI and one DP on the initial version of these
cards. You can't simply plug in 3 DVI or VGA monitors I am afraid.

ruud (AT) racer (DOT) nl (Ruud van Gaal) wrote:

As Tony says, ATI were a little economical with the truth on this hardware. They
emphasised the positive stuff but forgot to mention the the cost of active
displayport adapters, and little things like (a) no crossfire support yet (b) no
Triplehead support at all so far.

Which is a bit of a shame. I've been waiting to boost my three screen performance
and I was really prepared to pay full price for a 5870. I've never paid that much
for a vid card before (by a factor of two!) but the Triplehead experience is worth
some more investment and this looked, on paper, like a great bit of hardware for my
needs. No, not needs... let's get this in perspective: desires. :-)

Not yet though, it would seem. My Need For Speedier FPS in Shift will have to wait
a while longer.

Andrew McP