🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <542@mas1.UUCP>, shiv@mas1.UUCP (Shiv Haris) writes:
> 	The only problem that National Semi has is not being lucky enough to
> 	get the blessings of the Big Brother (IBM). Other than that
> 	National came to the scene of 32 bit chips long ago. It had
> 	no hangups of upward compatibilty and designed a decent chip.

My recollection is that the 32000s weren't passed by because IBM
disapproved but because they could not get their act together to ship
working chips.  Companies and individuals who were used to getting
functioning chips after 3 revs (less if they weren't alpha test sites)
gave up after 15 revs without working chips.  My personal experience at
Sun was that the first chips Motorola let out to us always had bugs,
but were good enough for hardware testing, and that the first chips, or
the next rev, were good enough to run Unix under, with compilers that
used the whole instruction set.  There were nits that might persist for
3 or 4 mask revisions, possibly requiring kludges in the kernel, but
nothing a compiler or application program had to worry about.

I also recall that the "full 32 bit" 32000 chip was only 30% faster
than the 16-bit version, while Motorola had a part in design that ended
up 300% to 500% as fast.  This tends to support my conclusion that
it was lack of expertise at chip design and debugging that derailed
the 32000.
-- 
Copyright 1987 John Gilmore; you may redistribute only if your recipients may.
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