XT/370 microcode

Veit, Holger holger.veit at iais.fraunhofer.de
Thu Mar 15 03:29:10 CDT 2018


You might look up Nick Tredennick's book "Microprocessor Logic Design: 
The Flowchart Method" which is sold at Amazon for an obscene price - but 
maybe some university library has a copy. It's focus is on a methodology 
for designing microcode, and it uses the design of the single chip 370 
to explain it. I suppose it was a PhD thesis.

The main point is that the 370 is NOT an 68000 with a different 
microcode; instead it is said that it implements the bus interface of 
the 68K in order to interface easily with existing peripherals (rather 
than reinventing the wheel). The internal data paths and register sets 
may be similar between the 68K and the 370 (actually it is quite 
possible that at Motorola they were aware of IBM mainframe 
architectures...) but that's all likely. The control unit design 
described in the book was completely redesigned for the purpose of 
describing the proposed methodology.

Holger

Am 12.03.2018 um 12:13 schrieb Dave Wade via cctalk:
> I don't suppose any one left in IBM has any knowledge of this. Perhaps no
> one ever did and it was all done by Motorola. Wikipedia says there were/are
> 2x68000 CPU's..
> .. I would ask on IBM Main...
>
> http://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/22/cpu-of-the-day-ibm-micro-370/
>
> seems to have some names..
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Lars Brinkhoff
>> via cctalk
>> Sent: 12 March 2018 07:02
>> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>> Subject: XT/370 microcode
>>
>> Does someone have good connections with people inside IBM?  I'd like to
> ask
>> about 68000 microcode for the XT/370 product.


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