Apple Quadra PC expected to deploy Motorola's 68060

Electronic News, Oct 5, 1992 by Jonathan Cassell

AUSTIN, TEX.--Apple Computer has committed to Motorola's upcoming 68060 superscalar processor for a future generation of Quadra workstations, sources report.

The Quadra systems, which now use Motorola's top-of-the-line 68040 processor, will likely upgrade to the new processor sometime in late 1993 or early 1994. Motorola plans to start shipping the 060 in the second half of 1993, according to Roy Druian, manager of 680x0 marketing applications.

An Apple spokeswoman last week declined comment on 060-based product plans.

Mr. Druian said the 060 will be a 32-bit processor with a superscalar architecture delivering three to four times the performance of the 68040 and faster than Intel's P5. The processor will feature integrated floating point and memory management units. Two initial versions will run at 50MHz and 66MHz. Mr. Druian said Motorola will reveal more technical details about the 68060 at the Microprocessor Forum this month in San Francisco.

Motorola earlier this year chose not to develop a 68050, which would have had only a marginal increase in performance over the 68040, because of immediate customer demand for a more powerful processor, according to Mr. Druian. "The market was not interested in a moderate step beyond the 68040," he said.

"The resounding cry from our customers was 'give me a big leap in performance.' As a result, the architecture of the 68060 will be a big leap--every bit as big as the original 68000 and the 68040," he added.

He said the decision to stop work on the 050 was not made in order to allocate personnel and resources to the PowerPC RISC processor development effort (with IBM and Apple), adding the two projects are under the control of different divisions. "Resources for 68000 wouldn't be allocated to PowerPC and vice-versa. It would cross too many significant boundaries," he said.

Several performance enhancement features were considered for the 050, including a 64-bit bus, an integrated floating-point unit and built-in graphic acceleration, Mr. Druian said. The 68050 would also have featured streamlined instruction sets, but would not have been superscalar like the 68060.

Apple, meanwhile, reportedly will first use the Power-PC 601, co-developed by IBM and Motorola, in a replacement for the mid-range Macintosh IIci sometime in 1994. The 601, according to sources, will execute 30 Spec-marks at 50MHz.