PowerPC: Motorola Looking for Buyer

[downix]

@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.

[downix]

@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.