Quote:
Originally Posted by turrican3
Hi guys,
what do you think about:
motorola continuing 68k cpus in 90's and not switching to ppc.
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They did continue 68k, with Coldfire. The problem was they couldn't make the 68k powerful enough to compete with Intel. Going RISC seemed like a good idea at the time... (and let's not forget that Intel did that too, but quickly realized the error of their ways).
But by that time it wouldn't have mattered
what Motorola did - bar making Pentium clones. The PC was it, and anything not 100% compatible was bound to lose in the marketplace. So the real reason Motorola failed was that they didn't have the 68000 ready in time for the PC in 1980. After that mistake nothing could save them.
However, if it wasn't for that the Amiga might never have happened! Or if they had managed to compete (and Commodore survived) the Amiga would have become a virtual PC clone, with all the attendant downsides. So in the end Motorola switching to PPC and Commodore going bankrupt was a
good thing for retro Amiga fans, because it froze the design when it was at its best.