The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Phil Smith III) writes: > Re RISC vs. 68K: > Anyone who thinks the RISC chips killed the 68K is off base. They > just need to check the dates. Intel killed the 68K. Motorola allied > with IBM on RISC only after Intel had destroyed Motorola's market for > the 68K. 801 was originally targeted (very) low-end ... ROMP chip was targeted to be used in a displaywriter follow-in ... when that project was killed, the group looked around for something to save the effort ... and hit on the unix workstation market (with the displaywriter follow-on morphing into unix workstation). lots of unix workstation market place is very numerical and power hungry ... somewhat as a result ... the followon to ROMP for that market was large, power-hungry RIOS chipset (i.e. POWER, announced in RS/6000). Paperweight on my desk (from original) has six chips, and says 150 million OPS, 60 million FLOPS, and 7 million transistors. somerset was combined ibm, motorola, apple project to do a single chip, 801 PC-level implementation ... the executive we reported to when we were doing ha/cmp http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp went over to head up somerset. part of somerset including infusing power/pc with some of motorola's 88k (risc) technology. ROMP and RIOS were single processer implementations with no provision for multi-processor cache consistency. power/pc was going to be able to support cache consistency and multiprocessor operation. lots of past 801 posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 68k was still hanging in there in 89/90 time-frame ... a couple posts with some old references from the period (raw chip volumes, business analysis, etc) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#35 Intel strickes back with a parallel x86 design http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#44 Intel strickes back with a parallel x86 design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
