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From: krl@jujeh.mlb.semi.harris.com (Ken Lyons)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Forth Engines / Harris
Message-ID: <1990Nov14.150715.28620@mlb.semi.harris.com>
Date: 14 Nov 90 15:07:15 GMT
References: <1982.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
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For starters, everything to follow is my opinion and not the official
position of Harris.  Besides, Friday is my last day there.

I think the primary reason for cutting funds to the RTX line (which is
not yet self-supporting) is that the market is down and sales are
lousy.  That doesn't necesssarily answer the question, "Why RTX and
not something else?"  It seems that presently the payback is better
for other lines, so the decision appears to be made for short-term
benifits, which is all too usual.

In terms of long-term benifits, there are serious obsticles to
overcome when introducing a new microprocessor architecture, market
inertia for one.  It appears a lot easier for a customer to stick with
a given vendor than to relearn a new architecture.  It is the path of
least resistance to say, "We're an Intel house," or, "We're a Motorola
house."  It takes time to investigate all the possibilities so the
easy or exciting ones are examined while the rest accumulate in a file
cabinet somewhere.  This is not to say that the big companies don't
offer advantages: they have the critical mass of sales to provide 99%
of the expensive support their customers want and still turn a profit.
In addition to this, for a new processor to be exciting it must
provide at least 2X obvious bang for the buck.  When introducing a new
architecture, the improvement factor has a large, application
dependent range, so the advantage is not so obvious.

If after considering all this, you still want to do something new, I
would bet that the intellectual property rights to RTX could be picked
up cheap.  There were many ideas we had to improve the architecture
that may be lost all because of a stubborn refusal to do things right
the first time.  All the same it's been fun; no regrets.

Regards,
Ken Lyons
Hardware Designer, looking.