🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 03 Dec 2017 16:55:01 -0500, Andreas Kohlbach
<a...@spamfence.net> wrote:

>On Sun, 3 Dec 2017 00:30:50 -0800 (PST), Quadibloc wrote:
>>
>> I had to dig a bit, as the Wikipedia article didn't give a figure - but the 68060 
>> used about 5 watts of power; this varied depending on which clock rate version one 
>> used.
>
>If the data you dug up is accurate, why not updating Wikipedia?
>
>> In comparison, the first Pentium used about 15 watts of power - today a small 
>> amount of power, suitable for laptop processors, but back then it prompted 
>> columnists to speak of being able to "fry eggs" on the processor.
>>
>> The 68060, of course, was a dead end - and its FPU was not pipelined, which badly 
>> limited its performance for number-crunching.
>>
>> This is in comparison to the original 68000, which used 1.75 watts of power. Quite 
>> different from today's processors, which might use, say, 90 watts.
>
>Would probably also have been a nice CPU for space probes then. A quick
>search doesn't say any space probe would had use it though. There might
>still be more less power hungry microprocessors...

Are you talking about then or now?  Now, consider that that 90 watts
is for performance that walks all over the most powerful
supercomputers that were contemporary with the initial release of the
68000.  Something as simple and slow as the 68000 would be drawing
milliwatts today.

As for space probes, Reagan pretty much killed NASA deep space
operations in the '80s--the only things they got off before the end of
the decade were Magellan and Galileo.  The Galileo design was started
well before the 68000 shipped and used 6 1802s and two 16-bit-slice
processors built from AMD2900s, all rad-hard.  Magellan pretty much
copied the Galileo design.