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From: eich@uiuccsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Re: National's 16k, no good designer - (nf)
Message-ID: <5972@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 1-Mar-84 22:32:48 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.5972
Posted: Thu Mar  1 22:32:48 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Mar-84 08:39:32 EST
Lines: 26

#R:sri-arpa:-1652400:uiuccsb:4400048:000:995
uiuccsb!eich    Mar  1 15:52:00 1984

/**/
More on National rumors:

According to a correspondent (not a NSC employee), National did the
chipset design in Santa Clara, and the in-depth VLSI work at its design
center in Israel.  The division of labor among chips, as well as the
CPU internals and slave processor protocol were designed early on.
Thus the 08032 and 32032 are already available, differing only in
external data paths.

Compare this to Motorola, which first did a nice (but buggy) cpu, and
deferred design attention to support chips.  After an abortive attempt
at an FPU, and a mediocre MMU, Motorola is promising a whiz-bang
floating function processor "three months" after the 68020, due 4th
quarter.  And the 68020 suffers incompatability problems due to lack of
foresight and planning.

Finally, call a National tech sales office.  They'll gladly sell you an
MMU or FPU.  My correspondent had used very early versions of these
parts with a 6 MHz 16032, and they worked.

	Brendan Eich
	...ihnp4!uiucdcs!uiuccsb!eich