68020/68881 Anyone?

[Jan Isley]

Now, wouldn't that be great?  An 020/881 in our unix-pcs.  If only ...

Yea, I know, we have talked about it before, but let us do it again.

I have a friend who designs 020/030/88000/etc... co processor boards.
The board in my Mac Plus has an 020/881 with room for 4 MB of 32 bit
memory and runs at *least* 10% faster than a Mac II at the same clock
speed.  Actually, my board can run at 25 MHz, but that is not the point.

The point is, he has designed about 20 different variations of this
board.  The variations go something like 020, 030, 88000, with or without
math chip, w/wo on board memory, w/wo on board memory management, with
or without a mac style SCSI port, etc...

He has done one for a VME 68000 UNIX system that has only a 68020/68881,
just take out the 68000, plug his board in, and it works.  The whole thing
is only about 1/2 inch high and about the size of a playing card.

No, I have not tried this yet.  But, I am getting one.  Who knows, maybe
it will work.  If it does not work, *and* there is a potential to sell a
bunch of boards, he is willing to spend a little time looking at it.  His
usuall fee *starts* at $20,000.  There is no doubt that he can get it to
work if there is a problem at first.  The only real problem would be that
he does this for a living and is not a bit interested in doing charity
work for our little unix machines.  Fact is he hates unix, says he does
not like sharing his computer with an operating system.

Of course, if there were enough people *really* interested in this, 
interested enough to actually spend money, remember this motorola silicon
is not cheap, he might be persuaded to debug it without his usual really
big non-recurring engineering fee.  I just check a couple of adds in Byte.
Single quantity prices for an 020/881 pair run $250 to $300 for 16 MHz.

I am neither a software or hardware gooroo, can't even spell it, but some
preliminary questions come to mind for the gurus out there:

  Are there any *known* reasons why an 020/881 would present a problem 
  hardware wise?  I think this would be the easy part?

  Any 020/881 fatal code in the software?

The other really obvious question is, would you buy one?  for how much?

-- 
jan at bagend  {..gatech..}!bagend!jan  (404)434-1335 voice at home