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From: ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.m88k
Subject: Re: Tektronix shutdown & move away from 88k's??
Message-ID: <15497@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Date: 19 Oct 90 16:15:52 GMT
References: <1990Oct14.003906.26373@wolves.uucp> <1536@ftc.framentec.fr> <1990Oct19.120218.9450@canterbury.ac.nz>
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Reply-To: ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii)
Organization: The House Of Fun
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In article <1990Oct19.120218.9450@canterbury.ac.nz> phys169@canterbury.ac.nz writes:
>What does this mean? Are 88K's going the way of Beta vtr systems, or are there
>just too many companies doing workstations. I get the impression Sparcs are so
>far out in front that other chips, even if they're better, are close to doomed.
>Well, that's putting it a bit strong, perhaps, but what is a realistic
>appraisal of the situation?

In my humble opinion....

I think this is pretty close to the mark.  While I would not call the
88k doomed, any more than I would call, say, the Intergraph Clipper
doomed, or the AMD29000, I think it has missed the chance to gain any
sizeable market penetration.   I think you'll find a trend in the
industry toward clustering around 2 or 3 architectures (as we have
really always done: 8080/z80 and 6502, 80x86 and 680x0, etc.).
Unless something really strange happens, you'll see the SPARC and
MIPS chips float to the top of the heap.  The rest of the pack is
left to niche markets or oblivion.

As far as technical issues of which chip is `best', I haven't seen too
many cases where this has been a criteria for being top of the heap.
It usually has more to do with issues like who delivers first, who has
the more agressive marketroids or who gets a design win with someone
big.

At this point in the game, I personally could care less whose RISC I
use.  They are all fast, there are nice boxes built with all of them,
and they all have reasonably good Unixes.  Right now I'm looking
for the chip with the kind of software profusion that has made the IBM
PC the thing most of the world thinks of when they think of computers.
Narrowing the market to a few decent architectures will help this
along (cloning, e.g. LSI Logic SPARCkit, etc., helps even more).

Sigh...and I had such hopes for the 88k.  

--
	ken seefried iii	"A snear, a snarl, a whip that
	ken@dali.gatech.edu	 stings...these are a few of
				 my favorite things..."