4 ms·

Wow. $500 for a 68000?!

kabdib 11y ago
I don't recall the COGs for the ST (they held this stuff pretty close), but in 1985, the 68000 CPU couldn't have been more than $50, probably less. Almost certainly much less because the Tramiels were absolute wizards at making deals.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  1985 was 6 years after the 68K was reduced. By Moore's law, the cost of manufacturing should have been about 1/16th of what it was in 1979, so the volume price was probably around 1/16th of introduction as well.
  - kabdib 11y ago
    Remember that everything on the ST was being costed in early or mid 1984, about a year before the ST shipped. (Which in retrospect was an amazingly compressed schedule...) I think that the National 32032 would have beaten the 68K in cost; National was pretty hungry and willing to make good deals. But their chips were rather extremely very buggy (which the Tramiels may not have cared about, since making software engineers suffer was part of their model), but it was a relatively poor performer, clock-for-clock, and that made the hardware engineers go "ewwww" and after a while we software guys realized that National wasn't being invited over for meetings any more.
- yuhong 11y ago
  At this point the 68010 had been available for a long time and the 68020 was just released. These still had no MMU but had much better bus error handling than the 68000. In retrospect, it was probably trivial to do 68000/68010 versions of the same CPU by just changing the microcode.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    The 68010 and the 68020 both had (external) MMUs available. In those days, the MMU and FPU were almost always separate chips (I can't think of any exceptions, though there might have been some). Granted, the one for the 68010 sucked pretty bad.
    - yuhong 11y ago
      Yes, this is exactly what I mean. There was Motorola's own MMUs, but custom MMUs based on discrete logic was also common.
dsr_ 11y ago
State of the art high-speed CPU. You don't blink at paying Intel $500 for a Xeon 10-core doohickey, right? And like everything else in silicon, sizes went down, production went up, costs went down. The Palm PDAs used, essentially, 68030 at 33MHz (a variant called Dragonball) and started selling at $499 for the system and were eventually around $79 each. Now a slow, small Raspberry Pi runs $5, plus $25 in more or less required accessories.
protomyth 11y ago
This is why I wished the 6502 crew had followed up with a processor. This price and Intel pretty much killed any 16-bit or 32-bit follow-on to the under <$200 market after the C64 / Atari 8-bit era. For some real joy, check the 88000 pricing and see why it failed.
- happycube 11y ago
  ARM's the closest spiritual successor I can think of, but it didn't have the kinda traction to make a proper successor to the cheap micros... ... at least then. now, there are. :)

I don't recall the COGs for the ST (they held this stuff pretty close), but in 1985, the 68000 CPU couldn't have been more than $50, probably less. Almost certainly much less because the Tramiels were absolute wizards at making deals.

bryanlarsen 11y ago
1985 was 6 years after the 68K was reduced. By Moore's law, the cost of manufacturing should have been about 1/16th of what it was in 1979, so the volume price was probably around 1/16th of introduction as well.
- kabdib 11y ago
  Remember that everything on the ST was being costed in early or mid 1984, about a year before the ST shipped. (Which in retrospect was an amazingly compressed schedule...) I think that the National 32032 would have beaten the 68K in cost; National was pretty hungry and willing to make good deals. But their chips were rather extremely very buggy (which the Tramiels may not have cared about, since making software engineers suffer was part of their model), but it was a relatively poor performer, clock-for-clock, and that made the hardware engineers go "ewwww" and after a while we software guys realized that National wasn't being invited over for meetings any more.
yuhong 11y ago
At this point the 68010 had been available for a long time and the 68020 was just released. These still had no MMU but had much better bus error handling than the 68000. In retrospect, it was probably trivial to do 68000/68010 versions of the same CPU by just changing the microcode.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  The 68010 and the 68020 both had (external) MMUs available. In those days, the MMU and FPU were almost always separate chips (I can't think of any exceptions, though there might have been some). Granted, the one for the 68010 sucked pretty bad.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    Yes, this is exactly what I mean. There was Motorola's own MMUs, but custom MMUs based on discrete logic was also common.

dsr_ 11y ago

State of the art high-speed CPU. You don't blink at paying Intel $500 for a Xeon 10-core doohickey, right? And like everything else in silicon, sizes went down, production went up, costs went down. The Palm PDAs used, essentially, 68030 at 33MHz (a variant called Dragonball) and started selling at $499 for the system and were eventually around $79 each. Now a slow, small Raspberry Pi runs $5, plus $25 in more or less required accessories.

protomyth 11y ago

This is why I wished the 6502 crew had followed up with a processor. This price and Intel pretty much killed any 16-bit or 32-bit follow-on to the under <$200 market after the C64 / Atari 8-bit era. For some real joy, check the 88000 pricing and see why it failed.

happycube 11y ago
ARM's the closest spiritual successor I can think of, but it didn't have the kinda traction to make a proper successor to the cheap micros... ... at least then. now, there are. :)