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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Hardware News => Topic started by: Kees on June 10, 2003, 12:42:45 PM

Title: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Kees on June 10, 2003, 12:42:45 PM
According to The Register, Motorola is looking for a buyer for their Semiconductor Products Sector.

"Motorola management said a few years back that if the company's Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS) failed to improve its financial position, it would be put up for sale. It now seems that in recent times that point has been reached, and the unit will be sold if a buyer can be found."

Read the full story (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/31093.html) ...

Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: bloodline on June 10, 2003, 12:52:18 PM
Well, since they faild to ignite anyones fire with their PPC processors (except Steve Jobs, you is now wooing IBM), this was only to be expected.

Sad sad story... To think if they hadn't thrown all their eggs in to the PPC basket, things might have been different, but that is another thread.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Elektro on June 10, 2003, 02:30:30 PM
No wonder they always treated the cpu department as a ba#tard child...
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: meerschaum on June 10, 2003, 03:50:58 PM
it's a shame they didnt extend 68K and try to mass market it like Intel did with x86... try to open up markets...build new ones... motorola of the 1980's was a giant...they had the money to do it...but they didnt have IBM's forward thinking... they just wanted to sit and nerd out all the while losing money and the technological race...
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: bloodline on June 10, 2003, 03:58:22 PM
I think they wasted the 68k potential.. still every one was hyping RISC at the time, how were the Mot Bosses to know any better?!!?

I wanter where this leaves their Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory technology... :-?
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: System on June 10, 2003, 04:00:28 PM
AMD might make a good owner.

Athlon with 68k/PPC hardware emulation instead of x86 would be nice!
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Kees on June 10, 2003, 04:07:28 PM
@ mdma

Hmm ... i noticed your profile .. nice info you have about where your from :-)
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Casper on June 10, 2003, 04:09:01 PM
Quote
AMD might make a good owner.


Not very likely though. AMD has its own financial problems and they'll make much more money from their X86 line than they ever would from PPC.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Casper on June 10, 2003, 04:12:10 PM
What's left for Motorola to make money from now? Their mobile phone business has failed financially as well, since they couldn't compete with Nokia and Ericsson.  I always thought they made money from their embedded processor line, but apparently not.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: bloodline on June 10, 2003, 04:15:33 PM
Quote
Athlon with 68k/PPC hardware emulation instead of x86 would be nice!


I think the PPC and x86RISC-hybrid-beasties (Read Althon/Pentium) are quite a bit different and would not benefit from being an Emulation on an Athlon (The PPC can do it's own tricks)... The 68K on the other hand would be an ideal candidate for Athloning (ha!! I make new word!!!), but there's no market for it what-so-ever, the PPC (Haha, Mot killed their own baby)  and x86 have killed it's market share.

I dare you to buy AMD and then make a 68k compatible Athlon64, with support for 3DNow!, MMX, SSE, SSE2, long mode etc..., no I double Dare you, you have to do it now!!!!  :-P
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: System on June 10, 2003, 04:45:31 PM
Quote
Poster: nOMAAM Date: 2003/6/10 16:07:28

@ mdma

Hmm ... i noticed your profile .. nice info you have about where your from


:-D

The Netherlands share many points with Lanashire. Both good and bad! ;-)
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: asian1 on June 10, 2003, 07:02:21 PM
>Motorola selling IC division

The local Motorola IC division in Asia are IDIOTS!
I had asked them about ColdFire V5e, V6e, but they said it is impossible to sell such IC / IP core in Asia. Only US based Fortune 500 Electronic companies can buy the license. They said it is impossible for Motorola to sell such IC, unless the customer buy 1 million units!

I hope this is not another victim of Amiga's Curse:
A C E G I K M O Q S ....?

A Amiga, C Commodore, E Escom, G Gateway (almost bankrupt), I Invisible Hands, K Kouri Capital, M Motorola (IC Division), O OCPA, Q Quantum Fund (George Soros), S Sendo

Any idea about U and W? :-)
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: downix on June 10, 2003, 07:21:21 PM
@Bloodline

Actually, Mot *didn't* put all of it's eggs in the PPC basket, which
was the problem.  They kept producing EOL chips for far longer than
they should have.  Intel keeps it's customers coming back by offering
new chips.  Hard to sell new chips when the old ones continue being
produced.  It also makes it hard to mark-down the new chips, for you
are still producing the old chips.

Then there's the conflicting families situation.  Mot had, at least
count, 5 major CPU families they were supporting:  68k, MCore,
Coldfire, ARM, and PowerPC.  How is a customer to develop or even
choose which core to use?

A smarter strategy, once the decision to use PPC was done, would have
been to put all of Mot's production and development eggs into one
basket, reducing R&D costs, production costs, overhead, etc.  Instead,
they covered a major segment of their market with all 5 families of
CPU's.

annoyed the vendors to no end.  Then there's the whole retailing
aspect, Mot refused to sell chips in major markets, instead pushing
other solutions on their potential customers.  Drove them off in
droves to SPARC, MIPS, and ARM.  Then once they released what they'd
done, they licensed ARM to woo them back, not realizing that it wasn't
the core that they were running from, but their way of doing business.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: heimert on June 10, 2003, 11:03:53 PM
Mabe you should browse Intels site and count their processor families. Seems like Motorola isn't the only company that has licenced the ARM technolgy. :-D
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: downix on June 11, 2003, 01:05:37 AM
@heimert

By that comment, you've already shown that you lack any knowledge in this area.

The XScale ARM-compatable processor is derived from the StrongARM which Intel aquired from DEC shortly before it was bought out by Compaq.  (Along with several fabs in the deal)  When Intel purchased it, they closed-down their existing embedded lineups.  Now, why did they do that?

Same reasons I gave above.  They didn't want to compete with themselves.  They saw that StrongARM could be made to cater to their existing audience far easier than it would have been to cater their existing chips to StrongARM's audience.  So they canned their own lineup for this newly aquired source.

Intel's only failing is with the high-end Itanium.  They gambled too strongly on it succeeding x86 rapidly, so they could abandon their aged platform.  But things did not work out as planned for them, and Management is not willing to admit the mistake.  This could be the first step in Intel repeating the mistakes of Motorola here.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Hammer on June 11, 2003, 02:08:27 AM
The writing is on a wall when Motorola abandoned their 68K customers (e.g. Atari, Commodore, Capcom, Sega, and many others) and forces them to migrate to another CPU platform. Most of 68k customers are only a shadow of their former greatness.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: strobe on June 11, 2003, 02:15:18 AM
Crap, you 68k losers won't let go will ya?
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Hammer on June 11, 2003, 02:35:57 AM
Quote
AMD might make a good owner.


The 64bit MIPS family is their chosen CPU for their alternative/backup CPU family.  AMD markets thier MIPS lines under 'Alchemy'.

I don’t think AMD is in position to spend on yet another big expense. It’s more likely they may licence PowerPC ISA IF there is a large abandoned Motorola PowerPC customers.    

I don’t know IF IBM wants to rebuild their multi-source PowerPC market place regime via AMD.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: Hammer on June 11, 2003, 02:39:09 AM
Quote
Crap, you 68k losers won't let go will ya?

End results speak for their selves.
Title: Re: PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer
Post by: heimert on June 11, 2003, 03:58:08 AM
@downix
I find it strange that you can determine my knowledge in analysing market strategies by reading two centences that doesn't contain a single word about it, but hey, you're the marketing guru, right?

btw: my comment was meant as a joke rather than an argument against your posting (hence the smiley).