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This is a news article sent to us today, it seems very unrealistic, so before posting it I'd like to hear what you think?
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Motorola shrink 060 die for new run
By The_Joker on 2004-04-03
In a highly unanticipated move, Motorola in conjunction with IBM have temporarily resurrected their legacy 68k line of processors. The move was announced in a low-key product-change notification some time last week on the Motorola website.
The dwindling 68k community is warned not get over excited at the prospect of the "XC68060.z", however, as outRage discovered in further correspondance with Motorola, or Freescale Semiconductor as the chip-division is now to be called.
"We do not plan the manufacture of high volumes of these processors, nor do we intend to push its exposure to new markets", said Ron Helcham, Freescale Semiconductor Marketing secretary yesterday.
"We simply see this is a way of giving embedded application providers and users access to modern manufacturing processes, through an existing family of processors"
In recent times, IBMs well-publicised strained silicon and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) advances in manufacture process have seen its 970FX G5 PowerPC processor shrink to 0.09microns, increasing performance by 65% and reducing power consumption to a mere 24.5 watts @ 2ghz. In contrast, Intels 0.09micron Prescott PIV processor is drawing 100watts @ 3.2ghz.
The utilisation of this manufacture process, and a die-shrink of the 060 from the original 0.6 (E41J mask) to 0.09 microns should see a quantum-leap in performance from the original 68060.
"We should be able to push the 060.z to high speeds with minimal investment in design" said Mr Helcham.
"We've been able to push 100million-transistor chips to 2ghz using this technology, so the outlook is positive for the 060.z, which consists of only 2 million transistors at this stage"
When pressed on the speeds to be expected in the new manufacturing run, Mr Helcham would not commit. "We don't want to falsely raise hopes" he said.
"In keeping the 060.z accessible to lower-end markets, we do not intend to invest significant resources in expanding the original 060 design, which would be required to effectively utilise multi-gigahertz clockspeeds. We simply want to take advantage of the new manufacturing processes available to us, to deliver a quick, cheap increase in performance for this legacy processor."
"Supporting greatly higher clock speeds would require some additions to the design, (increasing the length of the pipeline, for instance), which would draw design resources which we do not feel the market is able to support"
He did offer a tantalising glimmer of hope for breaking the Ghz barrier, however, when further questioned.
"An increase of 50,000 to 100,000 transistors for longer pipeline would not be deemed an unreasonable expansion, depending on how existing pipeline technologies can be adapted and scaled to fit the 060.z. If high costs are foreseen in our initial analysis, any such plans will be abandoned"
While the ominously placed ".z" on the end of the name is a pretty clear indicator that this will indeed be the last update to the 68k family, this should not disappoint 68k users, as any realistic hope of an update died years ago.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/35556.html
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/press/strainedsilicon/
Link: http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news
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As far as I can tell, motorola has no such press release, and nothing points to this being true. Anyone heard something else?
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Anders Eriksson
support@atari.org
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Opinion on this one? new
