[COFF] Why did Motorola fail? (Cost and performance)

[David]

Back when I was doing vision processing in a parallel way, I worked with the hardware guys to move from a 68010 to  the 020 and then the 040. Each was a big step up in performance and we had little work to do in the software other than recompiling to get the better performance.

And then I ran the vision algorithms on my Sparc desktop box (I think it was a SS10, maybe a SS20). And they ran about 30x faster. Same image, same results, 30x faster. 

So I spent some time to come up with a design that pulled the images from the camera directly into the Sparc host and with a little help from the hardware guys we had a board that would do that.

So it came down to cost and performance. I loved the 68k processors and was very happy with them, but we could build custom frame grabbers cheaper and have the host do the work faster.

	David