[HN Gopher] Why did the Motorola 68000 processor family fall out...
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Why did the Motorola 68000 processor family fall out of use in PCs?
Author : SeenNotHeard
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-10-06 20:54 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's odd how arguably the most relevant of the lot was fairly
| obscure at the time: Acorn computers, creator of the ARM
| processor.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
|
| You can run RISC OS on a modern ARM like the Raspberry PI - it
| gets weirder the longer you work with it - menu items with input
| boxes and other GUI widgets, a strange DOS VMS UNIX hybrid CLI
| that appears at the bottom of the framebuffer, scrolling your
| graphic screen up as you type and full of terminology that's
| incredibly excessively British.
|
| Go to 10 minutes to see the shell
| https://youtu.be/oL4w3AK6Qpw?si=Vdu2ur1fM0N9Tl2X&t=10m and
| http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_...
| for the documentation
|
| Also see 8:50 for the British terminology and 12:34 for an
| example of the weird menus
|
| The thing I like about it is the creators clearly knew what the
| dominant paradigm was and made a decision to be different. It's
| nice.
| tom_ wrote:
| It's funny that you mention the scrolling, also mentioned here:
| https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/kicking-off...
|
| The Acorn-type CLI is interesting (in my view), and I never
| realised why until I started using a PC rather than the BBC
| Micro: there's no shell. The idea doesn't even really exist.
| The fundamental system call (the OS_CLI SWI on RISC-OS, OSCLI
| entry point on the BBC Micro) takes an entire command line
| string, and do whatever that says to do. It's like the shell is
| permanently there. You never need to parse the string.
|
| This is actually pretty useful, because it means that for a lot
| of stuff you can simply defer to the OS. No need for interfaces
| to select filing system, choose floppy disk/hard disk, change
| directory, tweak key repeat rates, print disk catalogue, etc. -
| there are CLI commands for all of these, and more, so a program
| need only provide a way to enter a command to be subsequently
| executed by the permanently resident CLI. And as the program
| calls it, any commands so entered affect its state rather than
| being discarded on exit.
|
| The average file load/save UI on the BBC Micro was that you
| entered a file name. All the other stuff you might want to do
| first (select filing system, choose disk type, select drive,
| change current directory, check file exists or not, etc.) would
| be done by executing CLI commands via the program's interface
| for submitting such things. Feels like RISC-OS's unusual
| drag'n'drop file save mechanic stems from a similar mindset.
| timmg wrote:
| > Acorn computers, creator of the ARM processor.
|
| Whoah! I didn't realize they were the same company!
| dingosity wrote:
| Yup. ARM == "Acorn RISC Machine"
| pcc wrote:
| I don't feel as if there was so much of a dominant paradigm
| back in 1987, when RISC OS first came out, at least not outside
| of the US?
|
| I recall that period more as a melting pot of ideas and
| approaches from lots of manufacturers independently trying to
| figure out what paradigms might stick.
|
| There were many disparate approaches to text-based OSs: MS-DOS,
| Acorn MOS on the BBC which is the predecessor of the shell
| found in RISC OS, Sinclair, Atari, etc. Likewise, separate
| approaches to GUIs: Mac, Gem, RISC OS / Arthur, the Amiga, etc.
| Windows 2. Teams from Acorn, Research Machines, Sinclair etc
| all basically did things in their own way.
|
| While the Macintosh UI paradigm was considered dominant in some
| market segments at the time (eg DTP), there wasn't yet a
| universal expectation around how GUIs would work. That started
| happening more after Windows 3 came out, in 1990 iirc.
|
| Certainly there must have been cross-pollination of ideas
| between these different groups. Pretty sure these Docks and
| Task Bars with icons, that we all have at the bottom of our
| screens now, was an idea first seen in RISC OS.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| RISC hype mostly. Actually the odd one out is x86, which managed
| to hold on due to the massive software catalog and PC ecosystem.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| Oh man. I had to study this instruction set for a systems
| programming course for my undergrad. The project was to make a
| linker/loader that could run assembly code written in this.
|
| Boy does it have a complicated instruction set. Anyway, we early
| on negotiated with the instructor on what instructions we would
| support. Early education in defining scope for success I guess.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I am surprised that no one has commented on the difficulty of
| learning/using the 68000 Assembly language versus Intel.
|
| Iirc, there were no books available to me for the Motorola
| Assembly language programming nor do I remember having easy
| access to any environments for it.
| _moof wrote:
| Trial by fire via MacsBug!
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacsBug
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I never wrote 69k assembly but I did use the coldfire subset
| and it was downright delightful compared to x86asm. X86asm is
| by far the most confusing hacked together mess I've ever
| seen.
| rjsw wrote:
| I found 68k assembly language easier than that for the 8086.
| Just got down my copy of "MC68000 16/32-bit Microprocessor
| Programmer's Reference Manual" from the bookcase. Published
| by Motorola, don't remember it being particularly expensive.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Everyone knew CISC was dead and 88k was the future.
| dboreham wrote:
| Forgot the irony flag
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Yes. That's literally the explanation. Motorola wanted to move
| people to their 88k RISC CPU. Apple was planning to move the
| Mac to 88k; the 68k emulator on the first PowerMacs was
| originally for the 88k.
| kabdib wrote:
| We had 88K nuBus cards for our Macs. I was digging into 88K
| runtime architecture and toolchains to support it.
|
| Without warning, one fine day we were instructed to
| _immediately_ remove the cards and return them to managers.
| No explanations. It was the steepest edge to "this project
| is getting canceled" I've experienced.
| api wrote:
| It was only used by closed vertically integrated brands like
| Apple and Commodore (Amiga) at a time when open component based
| PCs were all the rage. I don't even think M68K motherboards you
| could drop in a case and build with were even available. If they
| were it was never a big thing.
|
| The entire market dominance of the x86/x64 architecture came out
| of that era and came about because you could build PCs with it
| and run a variety of software on it including DOS, Windows,
| FreeBSD, commercial Unix, and later Linux.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only because IBM failed to prevent Compaq to start the
| component based PC market in first place.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Yep. This was, ironically, and in my opinion, the real reason
| the Mac never won the PC wars.
|
| Forced open-sourcing via clean-room reimplementation.
| api wrote:
| Oh definitely. The Mac lost because it was a closed
| platform in an era of open platforms where that open
| ecosystem was constantly driving up performance and
| capability while crushing prices.
|
| The modern Mac is actually more open than the classic Mac
| because it's a BSD system. The UI is proprietary but the
| underlying OS is pretty commodity and loads of software
| that runs on things like Linux runs on it with little or no
| modification.
|
| It was really a pretty magical time. I was a kid and a teen
| then and it seemed like the PC was this wide open field of
| limitless permission-free innovation. New software, new
| hardware, new capabilities were constantly being introduced
| and you didn't need an "entitlement" in an App Store or any
| of that nonsense. Nothing is really like that today except
| maybe the open source world, and even that kind of feels
| like a tar pit. There's still an open PC ecosystem but it's
| smaller and less dynamic.
|
| Of course I also understand what killed it. It wasn't just
| cloud/SaaS or mobile. It was also the fact that we now
| operate in a "dark forest" war zone environment where we
| all have to navigate a sea of malware and exploitive
| surveillance-driven borderline-malware. It's hard enough
| for knowledgeable people but for end users downloading
| software is terrifying. It's like going to the worst
| neighborhood in the city in the middle of the night and
| walking around among living-dead drug addicts asking people
| if they know where to find something.
| yetanotherloss wrote:
| Also a factor was that while clone machines existed of the
| IBM/Intel systems and earlier Apple and other 6502 computers,
| often out of Taiwan, the other vertical vendors managed to keep
| tighter control. 68k equipment from 3rd parties for Macs and
| such was much harder to come by. While that temporarily
| increased their margins, long term it meant that PC component
| costs kept dropping until you could get a 586 desktop that did
| 75% of a SPARCstation or NeXT for 30% of the cost.
| dboreham wrote:
| Betamax vs VHS, and similarly BluRay and Netflix won eventually.
| (modern PCs don't use 8086 either).
| DonHopkins wrote:
| For the same reason VHS beat Betamax, the 6809 should have won,
| because it had the SEX instruction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEX_(computing)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It seems the software was a massive influence because motorola
| cpus were successful in consoles.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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.
| Narishma wrote:
| I think the only successful console to use it was the Mega
| Drive.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And they still didn't have the volume to invest in the PPC to
| keep up with Intel.
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
| wk_end wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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.
| strangattractor wrote:
| From what I recall at the time Apple (as well as others) tended
| to do things to keep M$ OSs off their hardware and differentiate
| themselves from IBM so they would have more control of the
| platform and sell boxes. M$ goal was to be the dominate OS then.
| IBM misguidedly chose to make money on hardware. They were too
| accustom to getting exorbitant amounts for their software ie
| leasing it.
|
| It was not so easy to port an OS back then and IBM PCs were the
| dominate species so too was DOS then Windows. Zilog was starting
| to fade also - the Z8000 never caught on. Apple became the only
| company keeping the 68000 alive. Motorola was not up to the
| challenge of competing with Intel or Apple was not making enough
| volume to make it worth their effort. Apple - fighting the last
| war - thought IBM was their competitor so eschewed any
| compatibility with IBM PCs and chose to go it alone. It wasn't
| until later (after Jobs return) that they realized they were
| wrong and things had moved on. Reasons for choosing a CPU where
| more about power and speed.
| bell-cot wrote:
| From both vague memory, and a skim of Wikipedia -
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68020#Launch,_fabrica...
|
| - I'd say that Motorola management's motto was "Meh, whatever",
| while Intel management's motto was "Only the paranoid survive".
| pfdietz wrote:
| Motorola was an example of the adage "never invest in a company
| that has a museum to itself."
|
| (The Galvin Center has since been demolished, replaced by a Top
| Golf. There's drone footage on Youtube of various stages of the
| demolition.)
| aworks wrote:
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/museum-
| visit...
| pfdietz wrote:
| So it has come to this.
| karmakaze wrote:
| There are many contributing factors as are being mentioned. I
| would say the most dominant one is the success of the x86 PC.
| That success depended on the continued cost/performance value.
| M68k systems on the whole were considered workstation machines
| that looked down upon less capable hardware. Exceptions to this
| were the Amiga and Atari ST, which unfortunately competed
| themselves out of existence rather than against the PC market
| which was squeezing them out. The Macintosh was more capable due
| to its software rather than CPU.
|
| Once you have the success of DOS PCs and add growing exposure of
| Windows 2.x (e.g. Windows/386) filling in capabilities it's hard
| to compete with technically better but also much more expensive
| systems except in smaller or niche markets over time. Even the
| server market switched from the likes of Sun SPARC to x86
| systems.
|
| The theme is that cheaper and minimally viable has a larger
| market potential that wins if able to find a way to survive. An
| earlier/smaller example of this is how the 6502 ate the lunches
| of other/better 6800 or Z80 based systems. That success later
| failed due to stagnation of the hardware and operating systems,
| and again in-competition. The x86 PC-compatible market allowed
| competition between vendors while still using the same ISA and
| ecosystems DOS & Windows.
|
| _I grew up in this era having multiple Atari 8-bit & ST systems,
| using Apple ][, Macintosh, and rare access to Amigas. I was
| extremely disappointed with DOS+Windows prevailing over the more
| exciting systems from a graphics/sound gaming perspective. Market
| size won._
| jagrsw wrote:
| I vaguely remember those days, late '80s and early '90s, and a
| lot of it probably had to do with IBM's reputation. Amiga had its
| pro uses - like smaller TV stations using it with VideoToaster or
| Scala for broadcast management. But PCs had this vibe of being
| "serious" or "professional" that Amiga, Atari, and Mac just
| didn't have.
|
| On the technical side, Amiga had some downsides too. Its OS was
| in ROM, and while it was way ahead of DOS and early Windows back
| in '87, it got outdated by the early '90s. Smaller Amiga models
| didn't support hard drives without buying a pricey add-on, making
| them more like game machines where you were stuck swapping
| floppies.
|
| But if you look at OS and CPU architecture, it was almost like
| comparing a well-designed system to a mess. DOS was clunky, and
| x86 had its weird quirks: limited registers, awkward 8-bit
| compatibility, segmentation over paging, unnecessary IO
| mode/addressing instead of MMIO, messy assembler (prefixes,
| segments, adhoc instructions) you name it.
| roywashere wrote:
| Motorola 68xxx is not just Amiga and fun and games. I used to
| own a Sun 3/60 which is 68020 and most definitely very much
| business, much more than IBM PC
| bink wrote:
| As well as NeXT computers which started out on 680x0.
| vardump wrote:
| Until mid-nineties things could have gone either way.
|
| Then x86 DOS got Doom. Everyone had to get a PC now.
| creer wrote:
| There were many microprocessor designs out or coming out from
| everybody. Plenty of them got design-ins (chosen to have a
| product built around them). For PC, nobody could compete with the
| wave of the PC-compatibles running Windows on x86.
|
| Many of the new microprocessors did come out in non-PC products
| like workstations - where it didn't matter as much.
| n00bskoolbus wrote:
| Damn, I had a hunch that the fact I when learned it in my comp
| sci degree it wouldn't be useful in the future. I think it was
| 2012 when I took the class >.>
| creer wrote:
| The original question was "in the 21st century?" which doesn't
| make much sense combined with "in personal computers". The fight
| was long over for the 68000, or for PCs, by the time of the 21st
| century.
| JdeBP wrote:
| I think that seven different answers there and at least that
| many, also all different, posted here indicates that there isn't
| in fact a demonstrably correct answer explaining why the global
| market did what it did.
|
| Of course, any economist would say "Welcome to economics!" at
| this point. (-:
| hshxushx wrote:
| Intel won because of windows. None of those answers adequately
| give credit to gates.
| tivert wrote:
| This is the most interesting answer:
| https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/27727/21496. It talks
| in detail about design choices that made 68k hard to scale.
| ajross wrote:
| I think that's mostly wrong though, because as the P6
| demonstrated complicated CISC addressing modes can be trivially
| decomposed and issued to a superscalar RISC core.
|
| What really killed 68k was the thing no one here is qualified
| to talk about: Motorola simply fell off the cutting edge as a
| semiconductor manufacturer. The 68k was groundbreaking and way
| ahead of its time (shipped in 1978!), the 68020 was market
| leading, the '030 was still very competitive but starting to
| fall behind the newer RISC designs, leading its target market
| to switch. The 68040 was late and slow. The 68060 pretty much
| never shipped at all (it eventually had some success as an
| embedded device).
|
| It's just that posters here are software people and so we want
| to talk about ISA all the time as if that's the most important
| thing. But it's not and never has been. Apple is winning now
| not because of "ARMness" but because TSMC pulled ahead of Intel
| on density and power/performance.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| > as the P6 demonstrated complicated CISC addressing modes
| can be trivially decomposed and issued to a superscalar RISC
| core.
|
| Doing that required a very large amount of area and
| transistors in its early days. So much that very smart people
| thought that the extra area requirements would kill that
| approach. It still does take a large amount of area, but less
| and less relative to the available die. Moore's law basically
| blew past any concerns there.
|
| But it wasn't always obvious that that would be the case.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/features/1999/10/rvc/
| ajross wrote:
| It was obvious enough when 68k was still in the market
| though. The P6 shipped in 1995.
| ggm wrote:
| So.. if Motorola had taken the 88000 into TSMC and pursued
| the nm war down the size ladder do you think it would have
| worked?
|
| Maybe the 68000 -> 88000 transition was the problem?
| philwelch wrote:
| The 88000 first came out around the same time TSMC was
| founded, and long before TSMC became the world leader in
| fabrication.
| SomeRndName11 wrote:
| This is true only because today the borders between RISC and
| CISC do ot exist anymore, modern technologies would decode
| everything into uops anyway. But in 1980s and early 90s, this
| was not true. CISC was indeed more difficult to scale.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| ISA certainly isn't the most important factor, but your ISA
| has to be a good enough baseline. History is littered with
| ISAs that made bad enough choices that were limiting at the
| time (VLIW, Itanium) or handicapped future generations
| couldn't (MIPS delay slots).
|
| Arguably x86 and arm are the "RISCiest CISC" and "CISCiest
| RISC" architectures, and have succeeded due to ISA pragmatism
| (and having the flexibility to be pragmatic without breaking
| compatibility) as much as anything else.
| ajross wrote:
| Itanium and MIPS were... just fine though. Both
| architectures have parts that were very competitive along
| essentially all metrics the market cares about. ia64 failed
| for compatibility reasons, and because it wasn't "faster
| enough" than x86_64. No one saw much of a reason to run it,
| but Intel made them well and they made them fast.
|
| And MIPS failed for the same reason ARM pulled ahead: in
| the late 90's Intel took a huge (really, huge) lead over
| the rest of the industry in process and MIPS failed along
| with basically every other CPU architecture of the era
|
| Amusingly the reason ARM survived this bottleneck is
| because it was an "embedded" architecture in a market Intel
| wasn't targetting. But there's absolutely nothing technical
| that would prevent us from running very performant MIPS
| Macs or whatever in the modern world.
| aswanson wrote:
| This is what Andy Bechtolsheim essentially said when he
| talked about why Sun had to develop the SPARC chip. Motorola
| was just too slow. Great initial architecture not iterated on
| fast enough.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Apple is winning now not because of "ARMness" but because
| TSMC pulled ahead of Intel on density and power/performance.
|
| AMD's processors are also fabricated by TSMC; why aren't they
| competitive with Apple?
| ajross wrote:
| Not on the same processes they aren't, no. Zen 3 is on 7nm.
| Apple is shipping chips on 5nm, and has reportedly bought
| up the _entire_ fab production schedule of 3nm for the next
| year for a to-be-announced product.
|
| Again, everything comes down to process. ISA isn't
| important.
| selectodude wrote:
| That yet to be announced product is the iPhone 15 Pro,
| for the record.
| Anarch157a wrote:
| Node proccess. Apple can out-spend AMD 100 to 1, they use
| their deep pockets to buy all the fabrication capacity of
| TSMC's latest proccess for a while, meaning AMD only has
| access to the previos one. This is where Apples perf/watt
| advantage comea from.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| In the era under discussion, a "PC" was _by definition_ a
| computer with an x86 processor, and Macs and Amigas and Ataris
| were Something Else for boutique users.
| jonsen wrote:
| "by definition" is a little harsh, and "with an x86 processor"
| is a little too narrow:
|
| "The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer
| history, has not meant "personal computer" generally, but
| rather an x86 computer capable of running the same software
| that a contemporary IBM PC could.":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Here's Steve Wozniak referring to the Apple II as a "personal
| computer" before the 8086 was released:
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-05/page/n35/m...
| [deleted]
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I started working professionally in the late 1980s and it seemed
| like the big competition at the time was between x86 and 680x0
| variants.
|
| From the Mac right up to multiprocessing minis (Bull DPX/2 for
| example could be had with 4 68030), plus a variety of high end
| workstation vendors (Sun, Apollo) the 680x0 seemed like a much
| higher end processor than anything Intel based.
|
| Then Sun dropped it in favour of Sparc.
|
| It took a while but the 386 and it's replacements gradually ate
| everything in that space thanks to Compaq leading the way. Even
| Sun had intel based machines.
| tedunangst wrote:
| HP also had a 68k workstation line before PA-RISC.
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