Atari Falcon - Technicalities

Technicalities

The heart of the system is the 32-bit Motorola 68030 clocked at 16 MHz. It runs at about 5.76 MIPS. Despite the 32-bit CPU, the Falcon does not have 32-bit architecture throughout its design, as it has a 16-bit data bus and a 24-bit address bus. Performance will not feel maximum benefit from the 68030's burst mode.

The microprocessor is supported by a DSP Motorola 56001 clocked at 32 MHz and performing no less than 16 million instructions per second. Although it is oriented to sound processing (it is directly connected to the RAM and codec via an interconnection matrix), it is also capable of graphics processing (calculation of fractal, deformations, 3D projections, JPEG decompression). It can even, jointly with the 68030, play MP3 files in real time.

Another innovation (for the time) is Videl. The possibilities offered by the graphics processor are limited only by its frequency (25/32 MHz core and could rise to 50 MHz with a hardware accelerator) and the slowness of the RAM because the graphics memory is shared with system memory which can degrade performance significantly when using high resolutions. The parameters are numerous, each timing of a video line (start, end, number of pixels ...) is adjustable, the image may be interlaced or not and the vertical frequency can go down to 50 Hz interlaced to display on TV. The number of colors is also adjustable when Videl operates in bit plane mode. This mode is available for compatibility with the previous generation, but is quite complex to manage. There is also a true color 15 bit mode where bits defining each pixel are grouped together to display 32,768 colors simultaneously. This mode is easier to manage but more resource intensive.

In addition, Atari adopted the IDE bus in addition to the SCSI bus for connecting hard drives and CD-ROMs. This allows for less expensive disk and CD-ROM devices, as SCSI interfaced devices remained relatively expensive. However, the IDE connector is internal and requires case modification to connect two hard disks or a single CD-ROM. The other drawback is that IDE uses programmed I/O unlike a SCSI drive that can directly access the RAM (DMA).