Re: [COFF] Why did Motorola fail?

On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 12:23:10PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: I'd say it was mostly a commercial/business direction focus, perhaps combined with lack of funds, that killed off the M68k family as a workstation/server CPU in the end. This is just my personal experience as an old Amiga/Atari/Mac geek though, so the official internal Motorola story may be totally different. IMHO Motorola lost focus and started betting on too many horses/markets and spread it's resources too thin to keep up the CPU horsepower race. The M68k family itself was a good example of this with the company trying to push it more and more into wildly different markets with all sorts of wacky models that lacked various components (FPU, MMU, etc.) but in the process losing focus and as a result no longer investing in really making big steps or taking big leaps with the 'full fat' workstation/server models to keep the platform itself up to speed with competitors from AMD/Intel in the CISC arena. Probably seemed like a good idea on the short term to sell more (cheaper) units, but in the end it may have been too short-sighted. Someting like the 68060 was a nice CPU but Moto really dropped the ball on the introduction and providing 'companion' support/emulation info for the reduced functions in some areas (MMU and FPU mostly) that killed it off for many system designers. Around the Pentium era when Intel started goming out with the second generation that started exceeding the 100Mhz clock rate it became clear that Moto had lost the race and was seemingly not really interested anymore. (or had ran out of cash?) I did hear some rumours that an 68080 was on the drawing board and a push to move the instruction set of the family to 64-bit, but I don't know how much is/was true about that. Even though (IMHO) the M68k was a much nicer CPU environment to work with than the 8086-on-steroids CPU's, you couldn't argue with the raw MIPS speed for the low cost of the PC's by that time... By the same time Moto also dabbled in the RISC area with the ill-fated 88000 series that never really gained traction apart from some workstations and (again) lacking focus as to what they wanted to do with the platform as far as it being aimed at embedded or workstation/server use. (the multi-chip approach probably didn't make system builders too happy either..) In the end I suppose they kinda got what they wanted as they got fairly succesful in the embedded market with the Coldfire as an 'm68k-reimagined' CPU that was at least more focused as to it's market/task. Although even there I guess they missed the boat as ARM (and derivatives) is totally prevalent in bucketloads of smartphones and appliances while Colfdire CPU's are not as popular. Small side-step.. The Coldfire is still so close to the original M68k achitecturally that the Linux/m68k tree is shared/merged with the Coldfire CPU support and even though the Colfdire is aimed at mostly embedded use they are starting to sprout MMU's and other bits.. Bye, Arno.