Yeah, pretty much that. I don't know what the situation was in 1986 or whenever, but I'm sure it was a huge deal that 68000 was licensed to many manufacturers. I don't have a lot of 68K machines, but it seems like whenever I look at a board with one, I don't know if I've ever seen an actual Motorola, it's always a Hitachi or something else. If ARM was single-source at the time (I have no idea actually), there better be a huge advantage to designing it into something, because you could potentially be waiting a long time to get the parts you need for production.Oziphantom wrote:Because ARM was this tiny little British company from the people that made the Spectrum and nobody had heard of them.
Don't forget all the embedded computers we are surrounded with, it's out of sight, out of mind. Lots of stuff embedded in ASICs and stuff that we use all the time, they're just not "personal computers" of course. I've heard that MIPS pretty much dominates routers and such, 6502 at some point was big in automotive, a while back Chuck Peddle said he was designing a USB 3.0 controller that had something like 6 6502 cores running inside it, and in recent years I'd heard that Renesas is the company that was selling more CPUs than anybody else. I'm a big tech dork and I'd have to say Renesas is a company that I've heard of, but that's about the extent of my familiarity.I also thing we are now in a post RISC world, I mean MIPS is dead, SPARC a memory, ARM now has NEON, and JAVA VM byte code instructions so its long past being "RISC". PPC dead. Scalar Super Computers distant memory