System design of the NEWS workstation

The authors describe the NWS-1800, a series of NEWS workstations being developed at Sony. Using two Motorola MC68030 32-bit microprocessors, one for the main processor and the other for the I/O processor, it provides superlative performance in an exceptionally compact package. The MC68030 contains a data/instruction cache and an MMU (memory management unit) and supports two-cycle synchronous bus transfer and burst data transfer between the processor and the external devices. The NWS-1800 series offers more than 5-MIPS (million instructions per second) performance. I/O processing, including displays, SCSI devices, serial I/O, and the Ethernet network, are handled by the I/O processor, giving this series of workstations the performance required of servers.<
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