bloodline wrote:
It appears Motorola were not fussy about who they gave licences to... so I don't expect there would have been the same sort of clone wars the Intel has had to face.
(SNIP)
Motorola on the other hand seen to have been happy to licence the technology, thus there would be more regulations on the technology, and less "push", I certainly don't think the PPC would have ssen the light of day...
...
Note that, one has to factor in AMD co-founder's Jerry Sanders's drive to be number 1 CPU manufacture e.g. AMD would license 68K ISA from Motorola and rev up the Mhz (i.e. the first CPU manufacture to break the 1Ghz at volume production). They’ll probably throw in million of transistors to make this happen.
IBM is currently throwing million of transistors (~55 million) with their PPC 970, just like the real world X86.
Just look at AMD MIPS's Mhz speed, Intel StrongARM's Mhz speed and compared it to Motrola’s StrongARM's Mhz speed. AMD and Intel's aggressive corporate culture was also applied for these CPU families.
Note that Intel was not against obtaining a license for alternative ISAs e.g. Strong-Arm.
The dominant chip now would be the Alpha...
Not with Alpha's cost. The old DEC doesn't have the focus for the average citizen.