Imagine, how things could have been...

[bloodline]

It's no secret that From a technical stand point IBM's choice of the 8086 for their "brand new" Personal Computer back in the early 80's was a shock to almost everyone.

All other manuafactures were looking at the 68K as the CPU of choice, simply because it was a better chip. IBM, contract with intel to supply 8086s very cheaply, apparently had a heavy bearing on the CPU choice.

But, I wonder what would have happened if IBM had chosen the 68k....  :-o


Just some thoughts to get the ball rolling:

Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
IBM would not have gained such a strangle hold on the market as there were plenty of other, better machines avaiable which, with a little poking, were quite compatible... :-D

[DaveP]

Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...

Highly unlikely.

[bloodline]

DaveP wrote:

Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...

Highly unlikely.

you're right... we'd be on 20Mhz 68000s....  :-D

[B00tDisk]

bloodline wrote:

But, I wonder what would have happened if IBM had chosen the 68k....  :-o


Just some thoughts to get the ball rolling:

Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
IBM would not have gained such a strangle hold on the market as there were plenty of other, better machines avaiable which, with a little poking, were quite compatible... :-D

It should interest you to know that IBM did, indeed, produce a 68k based workstation in the mid 80's.

I'd hope and pray that by now we wouldn't be limited to 100mhz anything in any "alternate history" event.  Yeesh, what a nightmare!

[Karlos]

Much of the ruthless development of the x86 was down to competition.

The 680x0 line really didn't have much in the way of clones. If there had been, those manufacturers using 68K would have sourced the best 68K price/performance ratio and maybe we would have seen 68K chips with the same lofty clockspeeds as todays' x86

The days of comparing 68K to x86 are just long gone...*sniff*

[DaveP]

Yes of course, the only other chip manufacturer than Motorola is Intel.

 :-o

[Karlos]

@DaveP

Eh? :-D

[JurassicCamper]

DaveP wrote:
Yes of course, the only other chip manufacturer than Motorola is Intel.

 :-o

AMD IBM etc etc etc /me scratches my head  :-?

[bloodline]

The 680x0 line really didn't have much in the way of clones. If there had been, those manufacturers using 68K would have sourced the best 68K price/performance ratio and maybe we would have seen 68K chips with the same lofty clockspeeds as todays' x86

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.

I mean, Intel has had always had to face other manufactures cloning their chips (from teh Z80 onwards), putting them in direct compretiton... 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... and the 8086 would have die without trace. The dominant chip now would be the Alpha...

[DaveP]

At the time there was zilog, ARM was starting up etc.

Point being, intel would have been in the Motorola position and Motorola in the Intel position with everyone cursing Motorola for their evil market dominance.

I don't buy the "if it was 68k people would have chosen better alternatives" the main sell ( apart from the brand IBM ) was its ability to run CP/M stuff which got the developers on board and then the rest of the market followed.

Other 68k items would have had a better chance of being compatible and selling in bigger volumes but thats about it. We would have all been using Intel chips in our Amagos and moaning about silly big endian architectures.

Plus people here seem to forget that it was IBMs input that gave birth to the 386.

[mikeymike]

Microsoft Windows primarily for PPC, Apple lagging behind on the aging, lack of development x86 platform, no other operating systems available... what's the point in this thread? :-)

[Beakster]

Well the reason computers like Amiga and MAc were using the 68k is because it was a better processor in many respects to the x86.  If the situations had been reversed and IBM were using the 68k in their PC clones, I don't think this would have affected the decisions of other companies and the x86 would surley have had a similar future to the Z80.

It would have been interesting to see how far the 68k would have been pushed, e.g. if the 040 = 486 and 060 - pentium, we would be on some sort of 3GHz 68090 by now.

PCC would have turned up much later as a server processor, like the intel itanium.

Its always funny to think how far people can push things.  A not so great chip like the 8086 pushed to the P4s we have today, or making faster and faster F1 cars with all the restrictions that have been placed upon them.

A more interesting line of though though is what would the world be like if Commodore has made the Amiga architecture open.  And rather than PC compatibles we had Amiga compatibles.

Microsoft would have no place in the OS market as the dominant os would be something like AmigaOSX.

All in all I think the world would be further ahead.  If the amiga could do in 1992 with OS3 what XP still struggles with in some respects, imagine what it would be like now.

Of course there is also the possiblity that with some decent marketing Amiga could realistically be as or more popular than Mac just now.  

But such is the way of things.  :-(

[bluefunk]

mikeymike wrote:
Microsoft Windows primarily for PPC, Apple lagging behind on the aging, lack of development x86 platform, no other operating systems available... what's the point in this thread? :-)

Well, Amiga would be using x86 - and in the same position as today  :-D

[Matt_H]

Imagine, how things could have been...

No. Let's not. It makes me want to cry.  :cry:

But seriously, that deal probably would have made the 68k the mainstream chip. Therefore, it's logical to assume that the product line would have been expanded, and we'd probably have 68090s by now.

Amiga Format ran a news article once about theoretical speeds of an 060. They went into the 200MHz+ zone with refined manufacturing. There's a lot of technological potential left in 68k, just not financial.

[bloodline]

Matt_H wrote:

Imagine, how things could have been...

No. Let's not. It makes me want to cry.  :cry:

But seriously, that deal probably would have made the 68k the mainstream chip. Therefore, it's logical to assume that the product line would have been expanded, and we'd probably have 68090s by now.

Amiga Format ran a news article once about theoretical speeds of an 060. They went into the 200MHz+ zone with refined manufacturing. There's a lot of technological potential left in 68k, just not financial.

Technologically the 68K and the 286 are from the era (with in reason!?!?), so one can safely assume that if the x86 can be pushed to the Athlon and the P4... there is no technical reason why the 68k can't be pushed in the same way.

I'm somewhat surpprised there has been less interest in 68K development.. History has shown that CISC/RISC hybrids (060,Pentium,Athlon) are generally more scalable, versitile  and compatible than their RISC cousins (PPC,Itanic...)

Still it's a shame about the Alpha  :-x