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From: nerd@percival.rain.com (Michael Galassi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: The RISK of going RISC
Message-ID: <1991Jun29.042109.18446@percy.rain.com>
Date: 29 Jun 91 04:21:09 GMT
References: <1991Jun26.230817.10620@elevia.UUCP> <1991Jun27.133021.3793@pslu1.psl.wisc.edu> <1991Jun27.163259.394@cs.cornell.edu> <1991Jun28.120042.7521@elevia.UUCP>
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alain@elevia.UUCP (W.A.Simon) writes:

>	I heard/read about the Ford deal, but I was under the impression
>	that it had nothing to do with the 88k, but with ASIC chips...
>	Any solid info, either way, anybody?

I don't know about ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), but
I believe Moto will be taking the 88k core (minus mmu, fpu, & cache)
will be integrating it with the sort of things they are putting on their
683xxx series.  Off the top of my head, serial ports, digital i/o lines,
timers, pll, a to d.  Initially only for Ford, later as standard catalog
parts.  This is from memory of an article in EE Times which I scanned
a while back and is probably at least partially wrong.  The Motorola term
for this in 68k family is CSIC (Customer Specified IC (I think)), could
this be what you were thinking about when you said ASIC?

All of this is mildly reminiscent of the amd 29k fusion stuff, started
out as a general purpose RISC cpu, when nobody wanted it for the lucrative
WS market they re-targeted it at the embedded market and got design wins
in several laser printers and I believe some video (Apple 24 bit board)
applications.  This is ALL PURE SPECULATION, I HAVE HEARD NO RUMORS, I'm
just drawing a parallel to a situation I saw not too long ago..  If you
quote this, specify the source as someone who knows NOTHING.

For anyone who cares, I make a living doing software for embedded 68K's
so I think its great that Moto is putting more resources into the
embedded market.

-michael
-- 
Michael Galassi				| nerd@percival.rain.com
MS-DOS:  The ultimate PC virus.		| ...!tektronix!percy!nerd