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I think it was clear even then that the 68k had an upgrade path ahead of it. Beefing up the 6502 would have been an evolutionary dead end, and left Apple with a

by nikanj 8y ago

I think it was clear even then that the 68k had an upgrade path ahead of it. Beefing up the 6502 would have been an evolutionary dead end, and left Apple with an even more fragmented market share

microtherion 8y ago
Ultimately, the 68k upgrade path was not THAT long. But I agree with the rest of your argument. As the triumph of x86 has shown, in microprocessors, superior shipping volume can drive investment that covers a multitude of architectural sins. And the 68K architecture was quite nice, actually.
zozbot123 8y ago
The Motorola 68k was just as much of a dead end in practice... and it took the Amiga and Atari ST platforms down with it, plus possibly others (it was used in a LOT of places). It's only very recently that the Apollo core has been reviving it.
- wk_end 8y ago
  Horrendous mismanagement at both Commodore and Atari respectively took the Amiga and ST down; the writing was on the wall for those platforms long before the 68k architecture was ever starting to plateau. Even Apple's transition to PPC arguably had more to do with everyone (Motorola included) hopping on the RISC hype train than with some kind of fundamental performance limitations inherent to the 68k architecture.
- jandrese 8y ago
  The 68k was also used in Sun Workstations at the time. Motorola's failure to improve on it left a lot of companies in the lurch, some of which never recovered. Certainly it started out in no worse a place than the 8086, and Intel was able to improve on that for many years. It seemed like after the 68040 Motorola just kind of gave up on developing chips, and then Intel launched the Pentium and ate their lunch.
  - wmf 8y ago
    After the 68040 Motorola was working on PowerPC because they thought it was impossible to improve performance and maintain 68K compatibility.
ken 8y ago
There was an article here a little while ago about the 1980's at Apple (can't seem to find it right now, sorry) where someone said they didn't go with x86 because someone (Motorola?) convinced them it could only scale up to some pretty unimpressive speeds (sub-100 MHz?). It turns out, if you try hard enough, any CPU architecture can have lots of room to grow. The Intel 8008 wasn't an "evolutionary dead end", so I don't see any reason the 6502 was, except the decision to let it be.

by nikanj 8y ago

I think it was clear even then that the 68k had an upgrade path ahead of it. Beefing up the 6502 would have been an evolutionary dead end, and left Apple with an even more fragmented market share

microtherion 8y ago

Ultimately, the 68k upgrade path was not THAT long. But I agree with the rest of your argument. As the triumph of x86 has shown, in microprocessors, superior shipping volume can drive investment that covers a multitude of architectural sins. And the 68K architecture was quite nice, actually.

zozbot123 8y ago

The Motorola 68k was just as much of a dead end in practice... and it took the Amiga and Atari ST platforms down with it, plus possibly others (it was used in a LOT of places). It's only very recently that the Apollo core has been reviving it.

wk_end 8y ago
Horrendous mismanagement at both Commodore and Atari respectively took the Amiga and ST down; the writing was on the wall for those platforms long before the 68k architecture was ever starting to plateau. Even Apple's transition to PPC arguably had more to do with everyone (Motorola included) hopping on the RISC hype train than with some kind of fundamental performance limitations inherent to the 68k architecture.
jandrese 8y ago
The 68k was also used in Sun Workstations at the time. Motorola's failure to improve on it left a lot of companies in the lurch, some of which never recovered. Certainly it started out in no worse a place than the 8086, and Intel was able to improve on that for many years. It seemed like after the 68040 Motorola just kind of gave up on developing chips, and then Intel launched the Pentium and ate their lunch.
- wmf 8y ago
  After the 68040 Motorola was working on PowerPC because they thought it was impossible to improve performance and maintain 68K compatibility.

ken 8y ago

There was an article here a little while ago about the 1980's at Apple (can't seem to find it right now, sorry) where someone said they didn't go with x86 because someone (Motorola?) convinced them it could only scale up to some pretty unimpressive speeds (sub-100 MHz?). It turns out, if you try hard enough, any CPU architecture can have lots of room to grow. The Intel 8008 wasn't an "evolutionary dead end", so I don't see any reason the 6502 was, except the decision to let it be.