Will there be an ACA1240 or ACA1260?

[donpalmera]

Unless he finds a good cheap source of guaranteed genuine, tested 68060 chips; and I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.

Wait.. random Chinese sellers on Alibaba aren't reliable? Ones that can offer products at less than 10% of the price of trusted distributors like Digikey etc? Offering products that have never officially existed? I am shocked.
On a serious note.. stop making so much sense.

[donpalmera]

There are posts and pics and videos proving that they do work. NatAmi's softcore CPU was never completed so all tests were done with 060 (regular and FE) CPU daughterboards.

Please link them then..

Many of us followed the NatAmi forum daily, so I can pretty much say that we know more on this matter then you do. There is no need for such an offensive attitude here.

Sigh, you followed some forums.. great. These chips very well may have "worked". But as I said.. I have 0.8mm pitch AE package 68SEC000s that don't exist that apparently work too.. would you ship a product based on these parts?

The fact that none of you even brought up the fact that Motorola mentions CQFP parts in their documentation when they apparently don't exist surprises me to be honest. I would have thought you would have mentioned it right away..

[donpalmera]

What's with the attitude? You asked, I answered as best I could, no-one on the Natami team has even though there's a few of them with boards out there including with these chips.

There's no attitude. Sorry for asking people to back up what they are saying.

I get the frustration about finding out more about these parts and where they come from but you have your answer, buy some, mount them on a board with a rom and start dumping output to get what you want.

Sigh.. this is exactly what I'm asking the people that are saying "hey, you hardware guys, you should make board with these super chips or else!?!!?".

I cannot access the section of the forum to get you that information anymore so I'm just repeating what info I remember. The output from the test programs, and the test programs themselves were available to us, the chips were tested and clocked upto 120MHz,

That information would have been interesting. I'm surprised no one can remember what mask these things are though.

They didn't have Motorola based numbering/revision and didn't appear to be repackaged 75Mhz QFP parts. Partly because they were a different physical size to the older QFP parts.

I'm very doubtful anyone would go the the effort to package bare dies or attempt to re-package already packaged dies. For Motorola QFP packages there is a stamp on the underside of the package that says where that die was packaged (For the 68000 series the dies have been fabbed in the US, Japan etc but it seems from the PCNs that most of the parts got packaged in Hong Kong or Mayalsia). You can use the information in the PCNs to verify the datecode on some parts (The PCNs say where parts should have been packaged on certain years).

I've never really cared where they came from

For your own use, yeah, whatever any old working chip will do. You can't ship that in a product as was being suggested..

but speculation has always been that Motorola produced some QFP 68060 chips in China

Motorola never had fabs in China.. and they don't seem to have every packaged chips in China either. Motorola's own documents mention QFP parts though. So it is possible they did produce some that didn't get to the point of general sale.. and some parts broker managed to get hold of them. Even if that is the case they are still a massive unknown and not something you would want to ship in a product.

and so the designs were just blatantly stolen. I doubt we'll ever get an official answer from anyone.

That's where it gets hairy.. no one in China is that crazy. Fab'ing bootleg chips from "motorola designs" would be beyond uneconomical.

[donpalmera]

So now you are admitting that Freescale LIED when they marked their chips as LC or EC ?  When in fact they were full 060s?

It's very common for multiple products to be produced from the same mask...
EC parts having working FPUs and MMUs is something you can go and verify yourself fairly easily. Whether those FPUs and MMUs actually work to spec is another matter but they weren't sold as such..

So now you are admitting that Digikey sells fake untested cpus for high prices?

Digikey is a distributor. They distribute stuff. They are a trusted distributor and they get their parts from the vendors. Vendors like Xilinx etc will only deal with trusted partners like Digikey. Digikey shouldn't need to test parts coming from vendors as the vendor has their own testing and you can get mask qualification data etc from Freescale. Fake/Non-working parts shouldn't get into Digikey etcs stock but if they do you have a chain all the way back to the original vendor. Compare that to Chinese parts brokers; 1: you buy some parts, 2: they come in the post 3 weeks later (Digikey ship parts from the US to here in Japan in about 3 days), 3: You unwrap the food wrapping film that has been used to pack the parts, 3.5: You wash your hands as for some strange reason parts from China/HK usually come stinking and covered in some sort of thin oil, 4: you notice the parts are fake, 5: you contact the broker .... you get no response.

P.S. Trolling does not mean asking people to backup what they are saying.

[donpalmera]

Why does it surprise you? We've discussed this rubbish on and off for years, even if we haven't mentioned the part numbers in posts to make it easy for you to find.

It surprises me because you would have thought instead making up some colourful story about Chinese guys reverse engineering the Motorola designs someone would have looked that the information Motorola put into the public.
I know what the part numbers are.. and they only ever appear on broker sites. You can give parts brokers any old part number you like and get something in the post.

So far people have "asked" if it's worth finding out about the FE133 parts, the answer has been "no".

Ok, so we can agree that people shouldn't be harping on that people should make turbo cards with these things then because no one has any idea what they are. Case closed. :banana:

[donpalmera]

The first five revisions are far from rare, are they?

Talked to a distributor today and they still had eighty 50MHz CPUs with MMU and FPU in stock.

First five revisions of what? the 68060? There are only 4 masks of the 060 from what I can tell.
I'm not sure if having the latest greatest revision is all that big of a deal either. From all of the 68060 turbo cards I have seen and all of the photos I can find online there seem to be a fair amount of them with the "buggy" revisions.

Here is the errata sheet if you actually want to check for yourself:
http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/MC68060DE.pdf?fpsp=1&WT_TYPE=Errata&WT_VENDOR=FREESCALE&WT_FILE_FORMAT=pdf&WT_ASSET=Documentation

[donpalmera]

Motorola frequently produced full 060s and just marked them as LC or EC when they weren't LC or EC.
I have one.  Its not supposed to have FPU/MMU and yet there it is, working perfectly, all these years.

This is exactly what I said. It could be the case that your EC parts failed some test and you just haven't noticed. If it works fair enough. If you were selling EC units as full parts and Motorola* suddenly started actually fabbing EC parts without the FPU and MMU you would be up **** creek without a paddle.
For another example of the same sort of thing some of the FPGA vendors will sell chips that are only verified to run a single bitstream as some of the part failed but not one of the bits you are using.. Those parts turn up as fully working parts sometimes. This is why semiconductor vendors now burn identifying information into chips.

If you buy these "no one knows what the hell they are" parts you might find you get some that work, some that don't, some that have visible signs that they have been recycled (I have had *new* chips with traces attached). If you want to hack up a board with one of those knock yourself out... producing a product for sale with such parts probably isn't legal.

*This is a fantasy situation. Motorola doesn't exist and Freescale aren't making any 68060 parts.

[donpalmera]

I am curious, is it the limitation of the actual 68k that it cannot continue to 68070

The 68k series continued in the Coldfire which isn't compatible enough. The Coldfire is another one of those things that people often bring up in "someone must make xzy" threads.

cannot go beyond 50 Mhz like 230 Mhz or 1 Ghz"

There is technically possible and economically possible. I don't see why you couldn't make a stinking fast 68k but there is no market for a desktop 68k processor in this day and age so there aren't any.

Amiga classic itself that forces the maximum limit of 50 Mhz for all 68K except with forced over clocking?

Or just dump the hardware and do it all in software instead. If back when I bought a BlizzardPPC new there were X86 systems that could run WinUAE as fast as they do now I would have never bought the BPPC.

[donpalmera]

No there is not now, but back then when it was used and needed why did they migrate to. PPC when it was possible to more than 50 MHz?

It might not have been possible to go further with the current design, maybe it would have needed a complete redesign.. so they just designed a new architecture. I don't think they did it out of spite.
This is sort of like saying "the z80 worked.. why isn't everything just a really fast z80"?