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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Because of the vast amounts of money being poured into wintel (dostel?) at the time, no one else could compete after a decade+ of being outspent 10x on R&D by Intel. Not Sparc, not Mips, no not Motorola either. Was just reading about DEC/Alpha in another thread.

Software lock-in, first from IBM then MS contributed to massive consolidation in the industry and until the old players tapped-out.

Presumably, with Intel's budget Motorola could have paved over the 68k's flaws just like was done with x86.

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I too suspect they could have - but even if they could have, it wasn’t at all clear that it would’ve been the right thing to do. Even for Intel I don’t think it was clear for a while that their gambit was going to pay off and bury RISC (or Itanium), and there was much less incentive for Motorola to maintain backwards compatibility. A clean design that was faster - and easier to make faster - must’ve seemed like a sure bet at the time.

Intel had so much money to burn they tried at least three different strategies and the market chose the winner. Compatible with Pentium, RISC with i860, and clean-slate with Itanium are those that come to mind.

Each of those projects undoubtedly cost billions. An incredibly luxurious position to be in.

I assume that's one of the reasons why they teamed up with IBM and Apple for the PowerPC. More resources that can be used for CPU development compared to them going it alone.

And they still didn’t have the volume to invest in the PPC to keep up with Intel.

Well, you had other issues going on within the group. IBM only seemed interested in server chips and later on their higher volume chips for the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360. Apple alienated Motorola by pulling their license for MacOS right before they were going to release a series of laptops that would compete with the PowerBooks. Motorola was not going to prioritize chips for Apple from that point on. Apple finally gave up and moved to Intel after that.

That’s the same issue. Apple was selling less than 2 million Macs then. Why invest in a low volume business?

We are seeing the same issue now with Macs. Apple would never have the resources to invest in the M series if they weren’t also selling 150 million A series iPhones and iPads, a few million M series iPads, 20-30 million S series Watches and miscellaneous other A series devices like AppleTVs and monitors.

The issue now is that even Apple is not willing to invest the resources needed to make high end ARM chips to compete with Intel on the very high end.

It seems the software was a massive influence because motorola cpus were successful in consoles.

Looks like the Sega Genesis used it because they got a 90% discount, and then paired it with a Z80 over fears it couldn't handle sound and video at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Genesis#Development

https://www.siliconera.com/former-sega-president-talks-about...

It was a decade old at that point. A decent win for an aging technology I'd say, but not a money maker. Power PC consoles came much later.

I think the only successful console to use it was the Mega Drive.

yeah, there's a lot of names, but the Mega Drive was indeed the only mainstream hit. SNK Neo Geo was a niche^2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000#Video_games

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