Back when I was doing vision processing in a parallel way, I worked with the hardware guys
to move from a 68010 to the 020 and then the 040. Each was a big step up in performance
and we had little work to do in the software other than recompiling to get the better
performance.
And then I ran the vision algorithms on my Sparc desktop box (I think it was a SS10, maybe
a SS20). And they ran about 30x faster. Same image, same results, 30x faster.
So I spent some time to come up with a design that pulled the images from the camera
directly into the Sparc host and with a little help from the hardware guys we had a board
that would do that.
So it came down to cost and performance. I loved the 68k processors and was very happy
with them, but we could build custom frame grabbers cheaper and have the host do the work
faster.
David