[COFF] Why did Motorola fail?

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 11:13:48AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 10:43 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > My guess is cheaper as well.
> 
> Maybe -- TI was the fab right?   Moto's fabs were pretty good, not as good
> at Intel in those days.

I'm not sure who did the first SPARC, I'd guess TI, they did most of
the follow on designs.  I know Fujitsu did some SPARC chips but I'm not
sure if that was solely for their own use or if Sun used those.  But I
remember a lot of TI chips and TI was not speedy turning those around,
the hardware guys were under a lot of pressure to get it right the first
time (and I think that was rare).

> I never really thought much of the RISC chips, accept maybe the by the time
> of the MIPS 4400 series; but then again they were were designed for
> compiler writers.
> 
> And the whole RISC thing was a bit of marketing.   

Yeah, I tend to agree.  But there was some wisdom in less is more, it was
easier to make the clocks go faster when the instructions are simple.