4 ms·

Please note that I can't confirm that Apollo used this approach - the earliest Apollo workstation I know (the DN300) used a 68010 already. I would love to hear

Please note that I can't confirm that Apollo used this approach - the earliest Apollo workstation I know (the DN300) used a 68010 already. I would love to hear more details on this... I'm also not sure which approach early SGI workstations used (the Iris 1000 series), documentation on those is extremely hard to find.

Tor3 3y ago
There's a Motorola document about this: https://ia904706.us.archive.org/5/items/Motorola-SeminarsandApplicationBooksDC-001VirtualMemoryUsingTheMC68000AndTheMC68451MMU/Motorola-SeminarsandApplicationBooksDC-001VirtualMemoryUsingTheMC68000AndTheMC68451MMU_text.pdf https://ia904706.us.archive.org/5/items/Motorola-Seminarsand... In there they suggest that "another bus master must perform this action" and that this one could be "an MC68000 MPU as well". I've also heard and seen the claim that Apollo workstations before the 68010 used this method, but it's difficult to find a definite source for this (though it's likely true. Every reference etc. to the pre-DN300 models claim 2x68000 CPU)
- eschneider 3y ago
  I can confirm that the early Apollos did this. Worked on one back in the day.
ThomasBHickey 3y ago
They did indeed use multiple 68K chips. In fact I have one of the motherboards down in my basement (sadly not operational).