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From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: ANOTHER 32-BIT MACHINE???
Message-ID: <359@oakhill.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 17-Mar-85 03:53:36 EST
Article-I.D.: oakhill.359
Posted: Sun Mar 17 03:53:36 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 18-Mar-85 07:54:00 EST
References: <brl-tgr.9254>
Reply-To: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Organization: Motorola Inc. Austin, Tx
Lines: 32
Summary: 

In article <9254@brl-tgr.ARPA> FRANK@sri-vax.ARPA (Victor Frank) writes:
>
>                 ROOM FOR ANOTHER 32-BIT CPU?
>
>
>     My opinion is that Motorola's instruction set is pretty neat, and 
>National's is probably not far behind.  These guys at Hitachi would have to
>go a long ways to improve on them.  By 1987 they may be out in the cold with
>a proprietary architecture.  If they are pin-for-pin and instruction-for-
>instruction compatible with either the 68020 or the 32532 they might have a
>prosperous future.  They could probably survive with an IBM 370 or VAX-11
>instruction set too, but not in the same market.
>

Some good observations.  Is there even a single person on the net that
knows about the T-90000?  After the MC68000 became famous Toshiba decided
to build (in their opinion) a better and faster processor all their own
using SOS technology (silicon on saphire.)  At the time I figured that even
if they could do it (SOS had never been proven in mass produced quantaties)
it could not possibly "catch on" due to lack of the massive backing required
for software development, hardware emulators, and lots of interested potential
customers.  At that time Japan had almost no original software products to
speak of so it seemed highly unlikely that they could produce an entirely
new OS with utilities and languages etc. for an all new and different
instruction set.

Microprocessor acceptance depends on many things but one sure requirement is
having attributes which will attract the backing of a large group of
supporters.

Motorola Semiconductor Inc.            Dave Trissel
Austin, Texas       {ihnp4,seismo,gatech}!ut-sally!oakhill!davet