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Just curious: if the 68k series had had the same amount of resources put behind it as x86, there's no reason to think it wouldn't be similarly competitive today
by glhaynes 14y ago
Just curious: if the 68k series had had the same amount of resources put behind it as x86, there's no reason to think it wouldn't be similarly competitive today, is there? (Obviously this was historically impossible because nobody had the incentive that Intel/AMD have had, so I'm just asking from a technical standpoint.)
- rbanffy 14y agoFor a long time, the Motorola 68K family was ahead of Intel in every respect. What it didn't have was the whole PC industry depending on it and feeding it with endless financial resources.
- ido 14y agoModern x86 CPUs aren't that much closer to being x86 than to being 68k since the Pentium Pro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#Summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#Summary They expose the x86 instruction set externally for compatibility, but translate it to a different instruction set internally. It is conceivable that you could have instead translate 68k instructions and the rest of the CPU would have remained the same.
- wildgift 14y agoI think Motorola put their money behind PowerPC, a RISC architecture. I think it was a smart move on their part, because, while PPC didn't do so well on the desktop, it got into embedded products like video games and network hardware. Today, the main CISC competitors to Intel are AMD and VIA, both who clone the Intel.