From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2018 08:45:09 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Why did Motorola fail? In-Reply-To: References: <20180810022310.GE4245@eureka.lemis.com> <20180810144320.GA17564@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20180810154509.GA21082@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 11:13:48AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 10:43 AM, Larry McVoy 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.