5 ms·

Anyone remember the Motorola families of chips? 68xxx and 88xxx.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
caslon 5y ago
Plenty of people do (they're some of the most beloved chips of all time), but their peak was pre-1990, so most people don't bring them up in discussions like this.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  They should. The 68K line was the Itanium of it's time. It overpromised and underdelivered and was crushed by the 286 and 386. Many vendors made machines based on it (Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, Sun Microsystems, Sinclair QL, ...) and all of those vendors either went out of business or transitioned to RISC architectures in a hurry. It was one of the many near death experiences the Mac platform had. It was more successful than the beautiful losers such as the TMS9900, iAPX 432, i860, NS32000, but it hit the end of track and left everyone in the lurch.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    I never understood why Motorola couldn't keep up with Intel in the speed race. If they had, 68K would be the dominant architecture today.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    Performance per clock cycle was much better on 68k. I understood that they lost out because the world adopted DOS and DOS run only on x86. Then... consequences. The only surviving platform that used to run on 68k is the Mac, which was a minor player even at the time.
  - justshowpost 5y ago
    68k were extremely expensive at the time, that's why they lost desktop market to their 80x86 killer. An additional factor was what XT and then AT became an open architecture.
- harikb 5y ago
  From what I remember, 68k processors were used by PalmPilot starting from the US Robotics days. I wonder if they had any particular power efficiency to make it better for Palm. Either that or I am remembering it wrong.
  - Matthias247 5y ago
    They are also used in automotive as part of the Coldfire CPU series. But I think a lot of this usage goes back to the days where embedded CPU families had been a lot more fragmented, and companies usually picked one family of their favorite supplier (based on pricing, fulfilling the use-case, etc) and then just sticked to it due to code not being particularly portable. Since that time the amount of CPU families that are actually used shrank drastically, and it's a lot more likely that all of those use-cases just pick ARM.
  - Trex_Egg 5y ago
    what is the main product line of PalmPilot?
    - harikb 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot
      - Trex_Egg 5y ago
        Thank you for the link.
ineedasername 5y ago
IIRC Motorola couldn't keep up in terms of producing competitive performant designs and lost out to competitors. ARM hasn't fallen into that trap. Then again, empires rise & fall, and the end of something is usually just a matter of time. But in the tech world the "end" is also some after-life embedded in another organization or pivoted to a different direction. For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change.
- stadium 5y ago
  > For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change. ARM as an architecture may be on solid ground, but their future as a company may be uncertain given that their IP seems to have been appropriated by the CCP. https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/09/08/arm-loses-china/ https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/09/08/arm-loses-china/
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    ARM and ARM China are separate companies. In software terms, while ARM China may have forked the ARM IP, they're not going to get any commits from upstream and it'll wither on the vine.
    - stadium 5y ago
      Optimistically, yes. On the other hand, there's a global supply chain appetite for cheap products including CPU's. Upstream commits aren't required to dump cheap CPU's on the market or to develop compute intensive businesses around them that undercut the competition on price.
      - nine_k 5y ago
        Controllers, maybe. High-end CPUs, hardly. That would require significant design efforts to keep up with ARM's development. Not that it'd be impossible for China to develop their own strong processor-designing forces, driven commercially or by the state. But so far it seems far from a trivial task.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Plenty of people do (they're some of the most beloved chips of all time), but their peak was pre-1990, so most people don't bring them up in discussions like this.

PaulHoule 5y ago
They should. The 68K line was the Itanium of it's time. It overpromised and underdelivered and was crushed by the 286 and 386. Many vendors made machines based on it (Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, Sun Microsystems, Sinclair QL, ...) and all of those vendors either went out of business or transitioned to RISC architectures in a hurry. It was one of the many near death experiences the Mac platform had. It was more successful than the beautiful losers such as the TMS9900, iAPX 432, i860, NS32000, but it hit the end of track and left everyone in the lurch.
- mark-r 5y ago
  I never understood why Motorola couldn't keep up with Intel in the speed race. If they had, 68K would be the dominant architecture today.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Performance per clock cycle was much better on 68k. I understood that they lost out because the world adopted DOS and DOS run only on x86. Then... consequences. The only surviving platform that used to run on 68k is the Mac, which was a minor player even at the time.
- justshowpost 5y ago
  68k were extremely expensive at the time, that's why they lost desktop market to their 80x86 killer. An additional factor was what XT and then AT became an open architecture.
harikb 5y ago
From what I remember, 68k processors were used by PalmPilot starting from the US Robotics days. I wonder if they had any particular power efficiency to make it better for Palm. Either that or I am remembering it wrong.
- Matthias247 5y ago
  They are also used in automotive as part of the Coldfire CPU series. But I think a lot of this usage goes back to the days where embedded CPU families had been a lot more fragmented, and companies usually picked one family of their favorite supplier (based on pricing, fulfilling the use-case, etc) and then just sticked to it due to code not being particularly portable. Since that time the amount of CPU families that are actually used shrank drastically, and it's a lot more likely that all of those use-cases just pick ARM.
- Trex_Egg 5y ago
  what is the main product line of PalmPilot?
  - harikb 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot
    - Trex_Egg 5y ago
      Thank you for the link.

ineedasername 5y ago

IIRC Motorola couldn't keep up in terms of producing competitive performant designs and lost out to competitors. ARM hasn't fallen into that trap. Then again, empires rise & fall, and the end of something is usually just a matter of time. But in the tech world the "end" is also some after-life embedded in another organization or pivoted to a different direction. For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change.

stadium 5y ago
> For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change. ARM as an architecture may be on solid ground, but their future as a company may be uncertain given that their IP seems to have been appropriated by the CCP. https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/09/08/arm-loses-china/ https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/09/08/arm-loses-china/
- dustintrex 5y ago
  ARM and ARM China are separate companies. In software terms, while ARM China may have forked the ARM IP, they're not going to get any commits from upstream and it'll wither on the vine.
  - stadium 5y ago
    Optimistically, yes. On the other hand, there's a global supply chain appetite for cheap products including CPU's. Upstream commits aren't required to dump cheap CPU's on the market or to develop compute intensive businesses around them that undercut the competition on price.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      Controllers, maybe. High-end CPUs, hardly. That would require significant design efforts to keep up with ARM's development. Not that it'd be impossible for China to develop their own strong processor-designing forces, driven commercially or by the state. But so far it seems far from a trivial task.