64E4 - MOS technology 32 bit 68K competitor?

[WolfToTheMoon]

There was a little known original internal
engineering effort at MOS Technology with the goal
of developing a 32-bit processor called the 65E4
relative to the 68K which was coming into
popularity at that time. The extra digit in the
exponent was a brainstorm which could only have
originated in the marketing department.
Anyway the "merger" with Commodore terminally
sunk that project.

 http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv021.cgi?read=213654

The author of the post seems to be a past MOS/C= employee...

I wonder what C= would achieve if they indeed had produced a 32 bit chip? Could have been a big source of income if they retained the same cost efficiency as with 8 bit line and a big competitor to 68K and early x86 designs. It could have made possible a C900 like UNIX workstation earlier than 85'. Amiga could have been made even cheaper by making everything in house...


Edit... it should have been 65E4 in the thread title, can some of the mods fix it

[ChuckT]

Jack Tramiel didn't want to spend money.  Ever notice why the C-16 had less memory than the C-64?  They didn't want to pay for it which means they were stealing from the customer by giving consumers less.  Another computer would have competed with their best selling computer.  Running two assembly lines is more expensive than running one assembly line.  When you have the plans for the 6502, why would you pay for more technology to put your best selling line like the C-64 out of  commission?  What would it have cost to have BASIC redesigned for the new chip?  You would have to pay for that too.

The reason why Jack Tramiel merged with Irving Gould was because he was out of money and the lawsuit with Motorolla made M.O.S. broke so Commodore assumed debt by buying M.O.S. as well.

Business owners generally don't all want to spend money.  Warehouses don't like stocking items because they can lose money if the item doesn't sell.

[ChuckT]

If you had a $2 dollar 6502 chip and a $6 dollar Z80 chip, which do you think would win out?  6502?  Why?

Do the math on how much you would have to borrow to ship 10,000 or 100,000 or a 1,000,000 units.  Would you want to borrow 2 million or 6 million for a million units?  That is money tied up until you get a sale.  How much could you save by saving 6 cents or 11 cents over a long period of time?

The best doesn't always win.  Cost wins.

And just think what your Commodore 64 could do if it had the best hardware.  No one wants to find out because everyone is happy with their old machines.

[ChaosLord]

Jack Tramiel didn't want to spend money.  Ever notice why the C-16 had less memory than the C-64?  They didn't want to pay for it which means they were stealing from the customer by giving consumers less.

WTF are you talking about?  Jack Tramiel gave us the B128 (128k of RAM) and the B256 (256k of RAM) in 1983.

The B256 which you famously refused to buy, saying "I want less memory!"

[ChuckT]

WTF are you talking about?  Jack Tramiel gave us the B128 (128k of RAM) and the B256 (256k of RAM) in 1983.

The B256 which you famously refused to buy, saying "I want less memory!"

The prestigious B128 wasn't sold and were mostly destroyed.  They weren't licensed by the FCC.

Prices didn't come down until the Commodore 64 which was 1983.
I don't know of anyone who has a Commodore B128.
No one knows the B128 existed and I've only saw a few liquidated in esoteric magazines and they were highly expensive and unsupported:

Due to the popularity of the C64, the P series was cancelled in the United States before it could be officially released; however, a few dealers who received preproduction units sold them. As these computers had not received approval from the Federal Communications Commission, this caused legal problems for Commodore. The units were recalled and destroyed, but a very small number exist today, in private collections. At least one model, the P500, was commercially released in Europe but only sold in small numbers.

The most common of the B series was the low-profile B128[1] (called the CBM 610 in Europe), which had 128 kilobytes of RAM. The B128 did not sell well, and ultimately Commodore's inventory was liquidated by Protecto Enterprises ("We Love Our Customers"), a large Commodore mail order dealer based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] The Protecto ads for the B128 bundle, including a dual disk drive, monitor and printer, appeared in various computer magazines for several years. The terms of the liquidation deal did not allow Protecto to advertise the computer's manufacturer, so it was simply referred to as a "128k computer". The Commodore name plate was legible in the photo in several of the ads, however.

[EndQuote]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_B128

The B128 or 264 became the C-16 which only had 16KB Ram.  

Market performance
The C16 was a flop in the US and was discontinued within a year, but it sold reasonably well in Europe as a low-end game machine (over 90% of all C16 software was produced by European developers) and in Mexico as well
The C16's failure in the US market was likely due to a lack of software support, incompatibility with the C64, and lack of importance to Commodore after its competitors withdrew from the market.[EndQuote]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_16

[psxphill]

Jack Tramiel didn't want to spend money. Ever notice why the C-16 had less memory than the C-64? They didn't want to pay for it which means they were stealing from the customer by giving consumers less.

The C-16 had nothing to do with Jack, his last computer was the $99 commodore 264 but he left before it mutated into the $299 plus/4.
 
He spent money on prototypes and cancelled them if there was not enough interest. A new processor would have been too expensive for a punt.
 
After he left, commodore didn't function at all well.

[ChuckT]

The C-16 had nothing to do with Jack, his last computer was the $99 commodore 264 but he left before it mutated into the $299 plus/4.

Gould suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to learn why they were able to outcompete North Americans in their own local markets. It was during this trip that Tramiel saw the first digital calculators, and decided that the mechanical adding machine was a dead end.[9]
[EndQuote]

I was a child when calculators sold for $100 or more and then TI and the Japanese dumped calculators on the market for $10.  Commodore was first called "Commodore Business Machines" and they were in the calculator market.  They took a heavy hit because why would a consumer buy a $100 calculator when you could buy one for $10?

Whether or not Jack got credit for this machine, the planning and direction took shape well before the C-16 came out for consumers and was delivered.  Their strategy was to drop the price of the C-64.  Their strategy was a price war from the beginning.  The 6502 was a $25 chip meant to replace a $300 processor / computer system or more.

[ChuckT]

WTF are you talking about?  Jack Tramiel gave us the B128 (128k of RAM) and the B256 (256k of RAM) in 1983.

The B256 which you famously refused to buy, saying "I want less memory!"

Why was the SID chip team only given a month to design the SID chip and what happened to them after the first month?
What happened to the original MOS team?
Why didn't Commodore fix the hardware in the 1541 making it faster?
What happened to the Commodore LCD prototype?
Why didn't Commodore invest in schools after the Commodore Pet?
Why were Ram expanders separate for the Commodore 64 and 128 instead of put on the computer?
Where was the Commodore hard drive?  They never invested in one.
What happened to the Commodore light pen?  It was never released.
What happened to the Commodore Midi keyboard?  It was only released in the Netherlands.

The answer is that Commodore didn't invest in these avenues.  Instead, Commodore lowered the price of the Commodore 64 every year decreasing profits.

If you were delivering newspapers with a car, you would have to reinvest a third of your profits into car maintenance.  Commodore made someone rich at the top and the money didn't go back into the product and I would see their job as design and to get machines out the door which they didn't do.  Instead, they were bleading money out of the company.

[RobertB]

If you had a $2 dollar 6502 chip and a $6 dollar Z80 chip...

The C128 had a Z80 chip.

...which do you think would win out?  6502?

The 6510.

Would you want to borrow 2 million or 6 million for a million units?

The C128 sold about 6 to 8 million units.

Happy New Year!
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

[RobertB]

Why was the SID chip team only given a month to design the SID chip and what happened to them after the first month?
What happened to the original MOS team?
Why didn't Commodore fix the hardware in the 1541 making it faster?
What happened to the Commodore LCD prototype?
Why didn't Commodore invest in schools after the Commodore Pet?
Why were Ram expanders separate for the Commodore 64 and 128 instead of put on the computer?
Where was the Commodore hard drive?  They never invested in one.
What happened to the Commodore light pen?  It was never released.
What happened to the Commodore Midi keyboard?  It was only released in the Netherlands.

Many of those questions are answered in Brian Bagnall's Commodore book.  Also many of those questions have been answered in CBM engineer Bil Herd's videos posted on-line.  For more specifics, why don't you shoot your questions to Bil at http://www.c128.com ?

Happy New Year!
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

[RobertB]

I don't know of anyone who has a Commodore B128.

Fortunately, my friends and acquaintances own B128s - PET gurus Larry Anderson and Mike Naberezny, vice-president of the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists (MARCH) Bill Degnan, and C= master repairman Ray Carlsen.  In fact, we had Larry's B128 for users to play with at the Commodore Vegas Expo v8 last July 28-29.  We ran some programs off of Mike Hill's product, PETdisk, when my MSD SD-2 was failing to recognize inserted floppy disks.

Happy New Year!
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

[psxphill]

Why was the SID chip team only given a month to design the SID chip and what happened to them after the first month?

The SID was designed by Bob Yannes and he took a lot longer than a month.
 

Why didn't Commodore fix the hardware in the 1541 making it faster?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km701Z3KQiI slow serial bus vic-20 13:45 c64 19:00

[ChuckT]

The SID was designed by Bob Yannes and he took a lot longer than a month.
 

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km701Z3KQiI slow serial bus vic-20 13:45 c64 19:00

We know why the 1541 was never fixed.  The question was just rhetorical in nature.

ANDREAS : What would you have changed in the SIDs design, if you had a bigger budget from Commodore?

BOB YANNES : The issue wasn't budget, it was development time and chip size constraints. The design/prototype/debug/production schedule of the SID chip, VIC II chip and Commodore 64 were incredibly tight (some would say impossibly tight)--we did things faster than Commodore had ever done before and were never able to repeat after! If I had had more time, I would have developed a proper MOS op-amp, which would have eliminated the signal leakage which occurred when the volume of the voice was supposed to be zero. This lead to poor signal-to-noise ratio, although it could be dealt with by stopping the oscillator. It would also have greatly improved the filter, particularly in achieving high resonance. I originally planned to have an exponential look-up table to provide a direct translation for the equal-tempered scale, but it took up too much silicon and it was easy enough to do in software anyway.

[EndQuote]

http://sid.kubarth.com/articles/interview_bob_yannes.html

From what I've read, they had about a month.

[ChuckT]

The C128 had a Z80 chip.
The 6510.

The C128 sold about 6 to 8 million units.

Happy New Year!
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

That is unfair answer because the C-128 had different goals, had to manage four different types of ram and it was a totally different kind of machine if you think about it.  They wanted CP/M on a machine so of course you had to use a Z80.  I remember the chips they had to use had something to do with the tank at the MOS building was leaking and something about they didn't want to produce one of the chips?

[ChuckT]

Many of those questions are answered in Brian Bagnall's Commodore book.  Also many of those questions have been answered in CBM engineer Bil Herd's videos posted on-line.  For more specifics, why don't you shoot your questions to Bil at http://www.c128.com ?

Happy New Year!
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

Irving Gould got control of the company and Jack Tramiel wasn't happy about it, Jack left and formed Atari.  We know that much.  A book isn't going to tell motives or things that are not discussed.

Irving Gould was a partner and he invested $400,000.  He later got control of the company.

If you wanted to steal a company, what would you do?  You would run it into the ground so the owner couldn't pay his bills.  A company that isn't doing good is worth less.  Right?  The value of a company goes down and you could get a billion dollar company for a steal.  Isn't this what happened to Commodore?  Is the book going to pick up on this?  I haven't read the book but maybe the author was busy on other issues.  Someone observant has to answer and that is why I posed this question to Bil.  He might not be able to go back that far and fully answer the question because it depends on when he joined Commodore.