[COFF] Why did Motorola fail?

[Arno Griffioen]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 12:23:10PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> Forty years ago Motorola 680x0 CPUs powered most good Unix boxen, with
> the exception of this upstart SPARC thing.  And then they were gone.
> I'm trying to remember why.  Can anybody help me?  I recall claims
> that Moto didn't put enough effort into development, but was this
> primarily a technical or a commercial issue?

I'd say it was mostly a commercial/business direction focus, perhaps combined
with lack of funds, that killed off the M68k family as a workstation/server
CPU in the end.

This is just my personal experience as an old Amiga/Atari/Mac geek though, so 
the official internal Motorola story may be totally different.

IMHO Motorola lost focus and started betting on too many horses/markets and
spread it's resources too thin to keep up the CPU horsepower race.

The M68k family itself was a good example of this with the company trying to 
push it more and more into wildly different markets with all sorts of wacky 
models that lacked various components (FPU, MMU, etc.) but in the process 
losing focus and as a result no longer investing in really making big steps 
or taking big leaps with the 'full fat' workstation/server models to keep 
the platform itself up to speed with competitors from AMD/Intel in the CISC 
arena.

Probably seemed like a good idea on the short term to sell more (cheaper)
units, but in the end it may have been too short-sighted.

Someting like the 68060 was a nice CPU but Moto really dropped the ball on the 
introduction and providing 'companion' support/emulation info for the 
reduced functions in some areas (MMU and FPU mostly) that killed it off 
for many system designers.

Around the Pentium era when Intel started goming out with the second 
generation that started exceeding the 100Mhz clock rate it became clear that 
Moto had lost the race and was seemingly not really interested anymore. 
(or had ran out of cash?)

I did hear some rumours that an 68080 was on the drawing board and a
push to move the instruction set of the family to 64-bit, but I don't know 
how much is/was true about that.

Even though (IMHO) the M68k was a much nicer CPU environment to work with 
than the 8086-on-steroids CPU's, you couldn't argue with the raw MIPS speed
for the low cost of the PC's by that time...

By the same time Moto also dabbled in the RISC area with the ill-fated
88000 series that never really gained traction apart from some workstations
and (again) lacking focus as to what they wanted to do with the platform
as far as it being aimed at embedded or workstation/server use.
(the multi-chip approach probably didn't make system builders too
happy either..)

In the end I suppose they kinda got what they wanted as they got fairly
succesful in the embedded market with the Coldfire as an 'm68k-reimagined'
CPU that was at least more focused as to it's market/task. 

Although even there I guess they missed the boat as ARM (and derivatives)
is totally prevalent in bucketloads of smartphones and appliances while
Colfdire CPU's are not as popular.

Small side-step.. The Coldfire is still so close to the original M68k 
achitecturally that the Linux/m68k tree is shared/merged with the 
Coldfire CPU support and even though the Colfdire is aimed at mostly 
embedded use they are starting to sprout MMU's and other bits..


							Bye, Arno.