The more I look into things the more I truly believe Motorola deserves as much hate as Intel.

All of Motorola's products are good initially, but then they get fat and lazy.

I've given many examples of why the 680X0 series was a boondoggle to Amiga. Too little for too much that came too late...

What I learned today is ...
Well besides that I finally found documentation that the 6800-series (not 68000) was using in GM vehicles in the 80's and early 90's - which I knew because I've programmed them... The 6800 series what drive the 6502 design...which eventually led to the 16bit WDC65816 and CSG 65CE02... (OK so CSG had a chip-naming issue since you'd never know the 65CE02 is 16bit via the name, it's basically a 6809 but faster and of course way cheaper). Motorla has it's own naming convention issues in the 6800 -> 68000 line. For instance, a 68HC16 is part of the 6800-line...ugh.

... anyway - the MC6845 is a display controller. It was/is the basis for CGA. Once again Motorola stagnated. Since Motorola never created a successor...what did Commodore do? They made the 8563 (and later 8568).

The MC6845 has 18 registers. The 8563's first 18 registers are IDENTICAL. Of course, the 856[3/8] has about double the registers. First 18 registers why the monochrome mode 80-col output is possible with a simple cable hooked up to 2 pins of the C128's 9-pin VDC connector. Commodore, being more of an innovator added extra features to the cloned MC6845 to give it near EGA-like capabilities. Part of this is why originally the VDC came with 16k since the MC6845 only had 14bit memory addressing, however the VDC has 16bit addressing which is why many 'flat' C128 owners upgrade to 64k...as the C128DCR's all came with.

The 6845, 6800-cpu series, 680000-cpu series and Motorola PPC line are all examples of a company that was fat and lazy. Their products cost too much and got stagnant, and improvements came too late..again over-priced.

Motorola was a foolish boondoggle to Commodore via the Amiga line.

I look at other threads on this site about an FPGA PPC! What a joke! What will that cost? You can already buy cheap PPC hardware via Xbox 360 and Wii U for < $200. Those consoles are trivial to 'jailbreak'. Who in their right mind will pay for a FPGA PPC that will be slower and 3+x more expensive?

Read the writing on the wall:
Motorola was a sh!te cpu company with sh!te products. That's why Commodore (and others) made better replacements for their crap. The original Amiga makers had a boner for the 68000. In the end, that boner f@cked the Amiga line.

Read the room: ARM won. 68k and PPC should only be emulated. Move on.

@Lou

Quote:

Lou wrote: The more I look into things the more I truly believe Motorola deserves as much hate as Intel.

Perhaps from choleric envious.
Quote:

All of Motorola's products are good initially, but then they get fat and lazy.

Perhaps in your parallel universe.

Their primary problem is that they become more and more leaner, due to the several cuts that Motorola applied, which compromised the backward compatibility.
Quote:

I've given many examples of why the 680X0 series was a boondoggle to Amiga.

Nevertheless, all such examples were big loads of b@all which have been completely dismantled one-by-one, and that's the reason why you escaped like a bunny and disappeared.
Quote:

Too little for too much that came too late...

Too late yes. And too costly compared to the competition.
Quote:

What I learned today is ...

Oh, do you... learn... something? Interesting...
Quote:

Well besides that I finally found documentation that the 6800-series (not 68000) was using in GM vehicles in the 80's and early 90's - which I knew because I've programmed them... The 6800 series what drive the 6502 design...which eventually led to the 16bit WDC65816 and CSG 65CE02... (OK so CSG had a chip-naming issue since you'd never know the 65CE02 is 16bit via the name,

Perhaps because 65CE02 was NOT a 16-bit processor? Maybe it's in your parallel universe.
Quote:

it's basically a 6809 but faster and of course way cheaper). Motorla has it's own naming convention issues in the 6800 -> 68000 line. For instance, a 68HC16 is part of the 6800-line...ugh.

?!?
Quote:

... anyway - the MC6845 is a display controller. It was/is the basis for CGA. Once again Motorola stagnated. Since Motorola never created a successor...

Because, and as you've correctly reported (incredible!), it was a display controller: it was built for controlling the display by taking care of generating all signals and a bit more of other things. The rest is up to the specific chip with customized it according the given requirements of the project.
Quote:

what did Commodore do? They made the 8563 (and later 8568). The MC6845 has 18 registers. The 8563's first 18 registers are IDENTICAL. Of course, the 856[3/8] has about double the registers. First 18 registers why the monochrome mode 80-col output is possible with a simple cable hooked up to 2 pins of the C128's 9-pin VDC connector.

Same as before: they customized the basic design. Normal and obvious thing...
Quote:

Commodore, being more of an innovator added extra features to the cloned MC6845 to give it near EGA-like capabilities.

Another load of b@all: no, it's FAR AWAY from the EGA.
Quote:

Part of this is why originally the VDC came with 16k since the MC6845 only had 14bit memory addressing, however the VDC has 16bit addressing which is why many 'flat' C128 owners upgrade to 64k...as the C128DCR's all came with.

Which hasn't changed the fact that the VDC remains a crappy display processor, primarily for the masochist access to such memory which made it super slow.
Quote:

The 6845, 6800-cpu series, 680000-cpu series and Motorola PPC line are all examples of a company that was fat and lazy. Their products cost too much and got stagnant, and improvements came too late..again over-priced.

See above.
Quote:

Motorola was a foolish boondoggle to Commodore via the Amiga line.

Perhaps in your parallel universe.

The Amiga fortune, like for several other systems, was to integrate the wonderful Motorola 68000.

Instead of a crappy 6502 or something like that, which would have made it super slow and completely crippled its future.
Only fools could have bet on such Stone Age processors when the future was clearly going towards 16 bit and more, with much more modern and efficient architectures.
Quote:

I look at other threads on this site about an FPGA PPC! What a joke! What will that cost? You can already buy cheap PPC hardware via Xbox 360 and Wii U for < $200. Those consoles are trivial to 'jailbreak'. Who in their right mind will pay for a FPGA PPC that will be slower and 3+x more expensive?

Some fanatical? Like the ones which pay hundred of $ for super crappy systems based on 65xx etc.
Quote:

Read the writing on the wall: Motorola was a sh!te cpu company with sh!te products.

In your parallel universe, envious!
Quote:

That's why Commodore (and others) made better replacements for their crap.

Like? Examples?
Quote:

The original Amiga makers had a boner for the 68000.

Not only them, but a plethora of other engineers loved them. For very good reasons.
Quote:

In the end, that boner f@cked the Amiga line.

Again, in your parallel universe. The problem for the Amiga was represented by Commodore managers AND engineers, which made a big load of b@alls.
Quote:

Read the room: ARM won. 68k and PPC should only be emulated. Move on.

Sure. And what about your crappy 65xx?

Now after your this psychological outburst you'll disappear again, as usual, bunny.

@cdimauro

You're retarded. You have to be real special to reply to posts sentence by sentence. I'd tell you to get a hobby, but instead - go back to making fighting games with 2 frames of animation and thinking it's good.

Actually, keep beating the dead 68k horse. I'm sure you'll beat it back to life someday...well I'm sure you're beating something anyway...

Lou Quote:

(OK so CSG had a chip-naming issue since you'd never know the 65CE02 is 16bit via the name, it's basically a 6809 but faster and of course way cheaper).

The 6809 has a much nicer ISA than the 65CE02. It is more expensive but has mostly 16-bit registers, improved orthogonality that allowed the number of instructions to shrink from the 6800 78 to 59, a base register and more PC relative addressing modes and separate user and supervisor stack registers for OS support. The 68000 has many of the same features but 16 GP 32-bit registers, three datatype sizes, only 56 instructions due to very good orthogonality, a rich set of addressing modes including PC relative addressing modes, separate user and supervisor stack registers, excellent code density, much reduced memory traffic compared to accumulator architectures like the 6800 and 6502 and better performance than the 6502, Z80, 6809 and 8086. The 6809 is one of the best 8-bit/16-bit CPUs ever yet the 68000 eventually killed it due to economies of scale making the very expensive but excellent 68000 cheap. I am sorry you do not know what a good CPU ISA and CPU are. Performance between the 6809 and 65CE02 I would expect to be similar for 8-bit workloads but the 6809 better for 16-bit workloads and for use in an OS. The 65CE02 was likely smaller and cheaper which may be adequate for small code but the 6809 is the clear winner for most uses.

A Motorola employee stated that it was the 6809 with 6839 floating-point ROM that was in the competition for the IBM PC against the 8088 and 8087 FPU. The 68000 was too expensive for IBM targets, had availability uncertainty and did not have a FPU.

Lou Quote:

The 6845, 6800-cpu series, 680000-cpu series and Motorola PPC line are all examples of a company that was fat and lazy. Their products cost too much and got stagnant, and improvements came too late..again over-priced.

Motorola had well known management problems and they stopped innovating when they started following instead of leading which began when they abandoned their organically developed 68k and 88k for PPC. They produced quality CPUs at a competitive price both before and after though.

@Lou

Quote:

Lou wrote: @cdimauro You're retarded.

Is your violated now satisfied? That's only thing that you can do: insulting people, since you were completely destroyed with your previous wall-of-non-sense, and unable to continue the discussion.

In Italy we're used to say: "è la consolazione dei fessi" (very roughly: "is the consolation of fools").
Quote:

You have to be real special to reply to posts sentence by sentence.

You know, when there are A LOT of things that were reported and need a reply, quoting is THE tool that helps on this to maintain the focus on the specific sub-context of the discussion.

Oh, you do NOT know, eh! That's the point.
Quote:

I'd tell you to get a hobby,

Haven't you understood that YOU are my hobby? You're here to make my days.
Quote:

but instead - go back to making fighting games with 2 frames of animation

Again you report this complete lie. I've shown videos were Fightin' Spirit sports several animation frames.

You're completely inventing things because that's what you can only do to satisfy your violated ago, dear child.
Quote:

and thinking it's good.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/17470/fightin-spirit/

Awards
Amiga Games
1996 - Amiga Game of the Year

Looser! And Envious! And... Child!
Quote:

Actually, keep beating the dead 68k horse. I'm sure you'll beat it back to life someday...

That's wrong. I'm ALSO supporting 68k, since I support my architectures (obvious) and My 66000 as well.

All architectures have pros and cons, and there's space on the market for all of them.
Quote:

well I'm sure you're beating something anyway...

Exactly. And guess what or, specifically, WHO I'm beating.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: I am sorry you do not know what a good CPU ISA and CPU are.

Indeed. Mission: impossible.
Quote:

Motorola had well known management problems and they stopped innovating when they started following instead of leading which began when they abandoned their organically developed 68k and 88k for PPC. They produced quality CPUs at a competitive price both before and after though.

To me one of the biggest problems is that Motorola never deserved backward-compatibility the right attention.

That's not only for 68k, but it's a general attitude which this company had with its products.

An architecture/ISA is like a contract: you define what can be done, and people expect that the vendor should be the first one to subscribe and respect it. Which wasn't the case with Motorola.

cdimauro Quote:

To me one of the biggest problems is that Motorola never deserved backward-compatibility the right attention. That's not only for 68k, but it's a general attitude which this company had with its products. An architecture/ISA is like a contract: you define what can be done, and people expect that the vendor should be the first one to subscribe and respect it. Which wasn't the case with Motorola.

I agree that Motorola should have maintained better compatibility, even for embedded use. It was petty and unnecessary to strip out every last unnecessary transistor going into the 1990s which was a problem for Commodore Amiga chipset designers too. They wasted more time and lost more customers from incompatibility and late designs than they gained from a smaller area and cheaper chip die. The 68000 was far from a stripped down CPU. Some competitors and customers thought the 68000 32-bit CISC ISA which was like an ISA for a low volume Mini computer was too fat for PC use at a time when primarily 8-bit CPUs received economies of scale. The 68000 was not only used for PCs which became the desktop market but economies of scale and Moore's Law allowed it to be used for the embedded market pioneering the 32-bit embedded market where the 68k remained #1 for more than a decade. The 68k was rich with expensive features at an affordable price until Motorola decided to start stripping it down for the embedded market. They did not just strip out mostly unused features but important features that were used even for embedded use.

The 68060 design was very good but suffered from unnecessary castrations that weakened performance, reduced compatibility and reduced adoption. The integer MUL and DIV instructions with 64-bit results were building blocks for high precision math support and GCC was already using the MUL to change 32-bit division by an immediate into a much better performance multiply. Few compilers had good support for the FPU including the important GCC due to so much FPU support being stripped out which started with the 68040. There were 68020 ISA mistakes which were rarely used and I have no problem with optional trapping for compatibility but Motorola went too far, likely to double the caches sooner than the Pentium. Performance enhancements dropped the focus on what had made the 68k so popular like code density and PC relative addressing modes. The PC relative addressing modes were a strength of the 68000 and 6809 which few other CPUs could match but the 68060 only allows PC relative addressing modes in the pOEP which reduces superscalar performance when the 68k should have been moving in the other direction of encouraging PC relative addressing and even adding a shorter encoding of (d32,PC) for greater than 64kiB offsets. This could affect the 68k Amiga which could allow PC relative non-ROM libraries instead of the less efficient libraries requiring the library base in a6.

lea (d16,PC),An ; 4 bytes, pOEP only
lea (d32,PC),An ; 8 bytes, pOEP only, extra cycle for EA calc and execution
lea (d32,PC),An ; 6 byte proposed simpler encoding

The 68000 and 6809 deliberately added PC relative addressing modes and pioneered efficient position independent code but lost focus and then changed focus to stripping and RISCifying the 68k. The treatment did not stop with the 68060. The ColdFire unnecessarily stripped out much more 68k functionality which they partially added back but too late for 68k compatibility. ColdFire suffered from being less upgradeable to 64-bit support that was removed from ColdFire like the 68060. The two primary reasons ColdFire died were lack of 68k compatibility and lack of 64-bit support including for primarily the embedded market. The ColdFire decline in code density from the 68k to be inferior to ARM Thumb(-2) did not help either when it was possible to improve the 68k code density to have better code density than Thumb(-2). Motorola lost focus, changed philosophies and let the competition beat them. Now Motorola/Freescale/NXP license their ISAs from ARM and pay them royalties for their designs.

Last edited by matthey on 27-Mar-2025 at 04:36 PM.

@matthey

Quote:

Motorola had well known management problems and they stopped innovating when they started following instead of leading which began when they abandoned their organically developed 68k and 88k for PPC. They produced quality CPUs at a competitive price both before and after though.

Sooo....exactly what I said: fat and lazy ... Like Commodore during the Amiga years.

Many 65XX variants had FPUs, 65CE02 has 16bit stack pointer so you could have when combined with bank-swapping, a 64kb stack vs the old single page. It also incorporated relocatable base page from the C128's MMU into a new B register that could be used as an extra register when not using base-page addressing. It added a 3rd indexing register (Z). Added 16bit addressing to all branches... The SiP CSG 4510 is that system in a package that gives you the MMU to address 1MB. With 2 exta MMU's the C128 could access 1MB as well. Also added an AUG instruction to pass instructions to co-processors such as the MMU. As we know many 65XX clones used co-processors.
Afterall, an Amiga with co-processors is just a slow and shitty Atari ST despite what relics like cdimauro would like to believe. The cpu doesn't make the system. The co-processors do. Only autistic weirdo's care about CISC 'programmer-friendly' assembly instruction sets. Most normal people use a higher level language for most coding.

All these cpu threads are a joke.
Move on! Until 68040, 68K had terrible IPC. That's why it never took over. When you divide that by the price - it wasn't worth it. Used 68060's on ebay are usually $250+... Why the heck would anyone want to build a retro-platform based on that? And that's just the cpu!

"oh 68k is so elegant!"

@Lou @cdimauro

Let's play nice here, please.

Lou Quote:

Sooo....exactly what I said: fat and lazy ... Like Commodore during the Amiga years.

Fat and rich is what made the 68000 and Amiga chipset popular. The 6502 CPU and Atari ST chipset were the lean and cheaper choices. The change from fat and rich to lean and late is what was bad for the 68k and the Amiga chipset.

Lou Quote:

Many 65XX variants had FPUs, 65CE02 has 16bit stack pointer so you could have when combined with bank-swapping, a 64kb stack vs the old single page. It also incorporated relocatable base page from the C128's MMU into a new B register that could be used as an extra register when not using base-page addressing. It added a 3rd indexing register (Z). Added 16bit addressing to all branches... The SiP CSG 4510 is that system in a package that gives you the MMU to address 1MB. With 2 exta MMU's the C128 could access 1MB as well. Also added an AUG instruction to pass instructions to co-processors such as the MMU. As we know many 65XX clones used co-processors. Afterall, an Amiga with co-processors is just a slow and shitty Atari ST despite what relics like cdimauro would like to believe. The cpu doesn't make the system. The co-processors do. Only autistic weirdo's care about CISC 'programmer-friendly' assembly instruction sets. Most normal people use a higher level language for most coding.

The PPC designers thought high level languages would give them the advantage but then assembly programmers optimized games like Quake and PPC was soon dead on the desktop.

Lou Quote:

All these cpu threads are a joke. Move on! Until 68040, 68K had terrible IPC. That's why it never took over. When you divide that by the price - it wasn't worth it. Used 68060's on ebay are usually $250+... Why the heck would anyone want to build a retro-platform based on that? And that's just the cpu!

The CISC 68k did not need to execute as many instructions per cycle as accumulator architectures like the 6502. The CISC 68k did not need as much code as accumulator architectures like the 6502. The CISC 68k did not need to make as many memory accesses as accumulator architectures like the 6502. The CISC 68k was easier to program than accumulator architectures like the 6502.

Lou Quote:

"oh 68k is so elegant!"

Simple hardware can be elegant in a way but not necessarily for the user. Simple for the user is elegant and that is what the 68k is about.

Lou Quote:


Retro Star Trek is a good example like the growing retro 68k Amiga market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series#Syndication Quote:

Fans of the show became increasingly organized, gathering at conventions to trade merchandise, meet actors from the show, and watch screenings of old episodes. Such fans came to be known as "trekkies", who were noted (and often ridiculed) for their extreme devotion to the show and their encyclopedic knowledge of every episode. Because fans enjoyed re-watching each episode many times, prices for Star Trek rose over time, instead of falling like other syndicated reruns. People magazine commented in 1977 that the show "threatens to rerun until the universe crawls back into its little black hole". By 1986, 17 years after entering syndication, Star Trek was the most popular syndicated series; by 1987, Paramount made $1 million from each episode; and by 1994, the reruns still aired in 94% of the United States.

With modern investment, the Star Trek franchise is estimated to be worth ~$10.7 billion USD in total revenue.

o Total Revenue: Approximately $10.7 billion
o Movie Gross: $2.27 billion
o TV Revenue: $2.3 billion
o Retail Sales: $4.75 billion
o Streaming Revenue: $2.6 billion

They could have settled for making money from the popular retro Star Trek reruns which is like retro 68k emulation today but it was worth immensely more to modernize. Of course the Star Trek franchise is not worth nearly as much as the Star Wars franchise but I would not complain if the retro 68k Amiga returned to similar popularity. The 68k Amiga market problem is fighting over the old episodes instead of investing in a faithful 68k Amiga NG with the original cast of 68k, chipset and AmigaOS that customers loved. Is the 68k Amiga dead and Bones or is it the real McCoy?

Last edited by matthey on 27-Mar-2025 at 07:44 PM.

@matthey

Just look at youtube.
There are infinitely more channels dedicated to the Commodore 8bits than Amiga.
So many new products have been released over the last 3 years and more keep coming.

You can now connect a CDROM drive to a C64 for a few dollars via the tape drive and it's faster than the standard IEC port.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2AZ-xdJRUM

Commodore's forward-thinking IEC port allows for infinite storage expansion.
https://www.tfw8b.com/product/sd2iec-vic20-c64c-c128-light-grey/

Lumacode allows for rock-solid HMDI displays
https://www.tindie.com/stores/c0pperdragon/

The Ultimate II+ and many other carts give the line REU ram, and a bazillion other features...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9o2-SL1-Ww

There's wifi modems...
https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=58

The market couldn't be livelier, unlike the grumpy old men on this forum.



But again, this thread is about showing how much Motorola sucked. Let's face it - IBM made the best PPC chips, not Motorola.

In the LONG RUN - Motorola was a trash company.

@Lou

1. My dislike of Motorola is the same as my dislike of ex-Motorola Hector Ruiz.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Sanders_(businessman)
The founding of AMD was due to the management style imported from Motorola into Fairchild Semiconductor. Blame Clarence Lester Hogan.

3. https://www.chiphistory.org/713-intel-s-founding
The founding of Intel was due to the management style imported from Motorola into Fairchild Semiconductor. Blame Clarence Lester Hogan.

Credit to ex-Motorola (vice president and general manager of the semiconductor operation) Clarence Lester Hogan turned Fairchild Semiconductor CEO, for creating X86 rebels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Hogan
In 1968 he moved to Fairchild Camera & Instrument as Chairman and CEO, taking eight senior executives (nicknamed Hogan's Heroes) with him

Motorola wasn't able to repeat the 68000's success for 32-bit era game consoles.

The same story with handheld 68000 based Dragon Ball VZ being displaced by ARM925T with MMU.

Motorola wasn't competitive against the 1991 era US$30 MIPS R3051 (R3000A compatible with embedded MMU) for PS1.

Motorola wasn't competitive against the 1993 era $40 MIPS R4000 offering for the N64 project.

_________________
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32/RPi CM4/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7950X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB

@matthey

The 6809 (with 16-bit ALU) family is a dead-end since it's not compatible with the 68000 (with 16-bit ALU). Motorola ground-zeroed the 68xx desktops with an incompatible 68000. Motorola kills its established platforms.

Zilog ground zero Z80 CP/M desktops with incompatible 16-bit Z8000. Early install base gains are wiped out. Zilog killed the Z80 CP/M establishment. Non-Z80 CP/M is not compatible with Z80 CP/M, i.e. CPU ISA difference wasn't abstracted.

FYI, 8087 also handles INT32 and INT64 datatypes in addition to FP32, FP64, and FP80.
8087 is a math coprocessor, not just a FP math coprocessor.

_________________
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32/RPi CM4/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7950X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB

@matthey

Quote:

Motorola went too far, likely to double the caches sooner than the Pentium

1995 released Pentium OverDrive 63 Mhz and 83 Mhz have double L1 cache i.e 16KB+16KB, as a mitigation against the 486's slower 32-bit bus.

Pentium OverDrive's 16KB+16KB L1 cache size was recycled for the January 1997 released Pentium MMX Socket 7.

AMD K5 has 16KB+8KB L1 cache size in 1996.
AMD K6 MMX has 32KB+32KB L1 cache size in 1997.

In the real world, X86s are racing ahead on L1 cache size when compared to 68060.

MIPS gained a 16-bit ISA in 1996, not just ARM's Thumb.

Last edited by Hammer on 28-Mar-2025 at 04:53 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 28-Mar-2025 at 04:49 PM.

_________________
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32/RPi CM4/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7950X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB

Lou Quote:

Just look at youtube. There are infinitely more channels dedicated to the Commodore 8bits than Amiga. So many new products have been released over the last 3 years and more keep coming.

The Commodore 8-bits are relatively simple, easier to define, more limited and easier and cheaper to recreate than the more dynamic, nearly unlimited but more difficult to faithfully recreate 68k Amiga. The 68k Amiga has also been sabotaged for more than a decade by A-EonKit and Hyperion. The Commodore 8-bit community gets pretty much the ultimate Commodore 8-bit in the MEGA65 while the Amiga community gets a PPC AmigaNOne abomination that is a cringe worthy embarrassment that will not disappear despite extremely bad sales numbers. The MEGA65 is likely outselling the PPC AmigaNOne and should not take long at the current pace to surpass the PPC AmigaNOne user base. Not only do Amiga IP squatters push their unfaithful and crap hardware but there is Amiga IP fighting and corruption that is a turn off to Amiga fans. Also, many retro fans spot cheap and unfaithful hardware. The new Atari VCS is another example. Many retro fans use cheap hardware and even cheap emulation but then most use cheap hardware like the RPi. Most retro fans prefer real hardware, FPGA hardware and then emulation in that order but price is important too. As good as the MEGA65 is, THE C64 from RGL is used more and has likely done more to revitalize the C64 and Commodore 8-bit retro market even though the MEGA65 is C64 compatible.

Lou Quote:

But again, this thread is about showing how much Motorola sucked. Let's face it - IBM made the best PPC chips, not Motorola. In the LONG RUN - Motorola was a trash company.

IBM and Motorola codeveloped and shared PPC technology. I believe some of the IBM PPC designs were very much overrated like the PPC970 (G5), PPC Cell (PS3) and PPC Xenon (XBox 360). Motorola/Freescale tended to produce more practical PPC designs but they sometimes suffered from minimization like the PPC603 (worst Macs ever) and castration like the QorIQ P1022 (A1222 with standard PPC FPU removed), especially for embedded use.

Hammer Quote:

The 6809 (with 16-bit ALU) family is a dead-end since it's not compatible with the 68000 (with 16-bit ALU). Motorola ground-zeroed the 68xx desktops with an incompatible 68000. Motorola kills its established platforms.

The 1978 6809 and 1979 68000 were not far apart in development or philosophies. It was reasonable to believe that the 6809 using 9,000 transistors would remain cheaper and lower end than the 68000 using 68,000 transistors (~7.6 times as many transistors). The 68000 killed the 6809 though which shows how important economies of scale are to chip production. The 6809 is one of the best 8-bit/16-bit CPU designs and it is too bad it was released so late. There is nothing wrong with releasing a much improved but incompatible CPU like the 16-bit/32-bit 68000. It was a better choice than breaking compatibility for improvements that still leave the CPU too limited like from the Intel 8080 to 8085.

Hammer Quote:

Zilog ground zero Z80 CP/M desktops with incompatible 16-bit Z8000. Early install base gains are wiped out. Zilog killed the Z80 CP/M establishment. Non-Z80 CP/M is not compatible with Z80 CP/M, i.e. CPU ISA difference wasn't abstracted.

Lack of compatibility was not the only problem for the Z8000. The 8086 was earlier with 808x compatibility and support chips, the 8088 was at the same time but cheaper and the higher performance and better 32-bit ISA 68000 came shortly after. The Z8000 was a new incompatible design but not the best anywhere and had bugs. They were unlucky that the competition improved so much in a short period of time. The later NS32k CPUs were good too but the 68000 was better and the early NS32k CPUs also had bugs. New ISAs are difficult to introduce and gain support for them which is why it is better to reintroduce good old ISAs which still have support and software like the 68k.

Hammer Quote:

FYI, 8087 also handles INT32 and INT64 datatypes in addition to FP32, FP64, and FP80. 8087 is a math coprocessor, not just a FP math coprocessor.

If it is faster to perform 32-bit and 64-bit calculations in the integer unit then it will be used instead of the FPU. I expect this is usually the case for 32-bit integer datatypes and 64-bit integer datatypes would have been exceedingly rare back then and still are rare on the 32-bit ISA 68k Amiga. Also, using the FPU may require expensive changing of the default rounding mode and even then results may not be exactly the same as performing all integer calculations. You are applying modern CPU usage to a time when 8-bit and 16-bit integer datatypes were 95+% of the datatypes. The 68000 32-bit datatype usually went unused but 32-bit datatypes were important for the large flat address space. The same was true when moving from 32-bit to 64-bit where 64-bit datatypes were rarely used but a larger address space was needed. Some early benchmarks showed better performance with 32-bit than 64-bit where resources are limited. If the address space is not needed, a 32-bit CPU can provide better performance and use fewer resources.

Hammer Quote:

matthey Quote: Motorola went too far, likely to double the caches sooner than the Pentium 1995 released Pentium OverDrive 63 Mhz and 83 Mhz have double L1 cache i.e 16KB+16KB, as a mitigation against the 486's slower 32-bit bus. Pentium OverDrive's 16KB+16KB L1 cache size was recycled for the January 1997 released Pentium MMX Socket 7. AMD K5 has 16KB+8KB L1 cache size in 1996. AMD K6 MMX has 32KB+32KB L1 cache size in 1997. In the real world, X86s are racing ahead on L1 cache size when compared to 68060.

From the in-order P54C Pentium to in-order Pentium MMX with 16kiB L1i+L1d circa 1997, transistors jumped from 3.3 million to 4.5 million which would have been difficult much earlier (includes an extra int pipeline stage and MMX so cache doubling is cheaper than 1.2 million transistors). The OoO P6 Pentium using 5.5 million transistors initially could not double caches to 16kiB L1i+L1d until about 1997 with the Pentium II. The 1994 in-order 68060 only used 2.5 million transistors and 16kiB of SRAM uses a minimum of 786,432 transistors. A 68060+ with 16kiB L1i+L1d likely would have used about as many transistors as a P54C Pentium and was practical already in 1994.

https://websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/mpr/MPR/ARTICLES/080502.pdf Quote:

68060+ —undisclosed architectural enhancements that increase performance 20–30% independent of clock frequency. Process improvements will bring further speed gains and, perhaps more important, cost reduction.

All these plans for the 68060 were cancelled shortly after announcement in 1994. Organic development of Motorola's 68k and 88k babies were thrown in the trash for IBM's PPC. The PPC AIM was more of a misfire that turned into a disaster for Motorola (and Apple) as both the embedded market and desktop market were surrendered.

@pavlor

Quote:

pavlor wrote: @Lou @cdimauro Let's play nice here, please.

Please, don't put me at his level:

You're retarded.

[...]

autistic weirdo


He's a frustrated person from the fact that he can't sell as the best processors his beloved, crappy, 65xx processors, and instead of replying on the technical side he goes personal directly offending which words as the above which are well beyond a "passionate" discussion.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: cdimauro Quote: To me one of the biggest problems is that Motorola never deserved backward-compatibility the right attention. That's not only for 68k, but it's a general attitude which this company had with its products. An architecture/ISA is like a contract: you define what can be done, and people expect that the vendor should be the first one to subscribe and respect it. Which wasn't the case with Motorola. Performance enhancements dropped the focus on what had made the 68k so popular like code density and PC relative addressing modes. The PC relative addressing modes were a strength of the 68000 and 6809 which few other CPUs could match but the 68060 only allows PC relative addressing modes in the pOEP which reduces superscalar performance

That's a limit, but since PC relative addressing mode requires 16-bit offset, then I don't see it as a big problem with 68060's 4B/cycle fetch limiti.
Quote:

when the 68k should have been moving in the other direction of encouraging PC relative addressing and even adding a shorter encoding of (d32,PC) for greater than 64kiB offsets. This could affect the 68k Amiga which could allow PC relative non-ROM libraries instead of the less efficient libraries requiring the library base in a6. lea (d16,PC),An ; 4 bytes, pOEP only lea (d32,PC),An ; 8 bytes, pOEP only, extra cycle for EA calc and execution lea (d32,PC),An ; 6 byte proposed simpler encoding

I see (d32,PC) only good (and mandatory) for a 64-bit architecture.

The 32-bit absolute addressing mode is good enough for 32-bit architectures.

Unfortunately, Amiga libraries are less efficient by themselves. Another concept which seemed a great solution at the time, but that turned out to be very inefficient compared to a traditional call (or even a memory-indirect call), due to the required double jsr/jmp.
Quote:

The 68000 and 6809 deliberately added PC relative addressing modes and pioneered efficient position independent code but lost focus and then changed focus to stripping and RISCifying the 68k. The treatment did not stop with the 68060. The ColdFire unnecessarily stripped out much more 68k functionality which they partially added back but too late for 68k compatibility. ColdFire suffered from being less upgradeable to 64-bit support that was removed from ColdFire like the 68060. The two primary reasons ColdFire died were lack of 68k compatibility and lack of 64-bit support including for primarily the embedded market.

64-bit support wasn't important at the time, but missing 68k compatibile was definitely the key point.
Quote:

The ColdFire decline in code density from the 68k to be inferior to ARM Thumb(-2) did not help either when it was possible to improve the 68k code density to have better code density than Thumb(-2). Motorola lost focus, changed philosophies and let the competition beat them. Now Motorola/Freescale/NXP license their ISAs from ARM and pay them royalties for their designs.

Indeed. They never understood the jewel that they had at their hands.

@Lou

Quote:

Lou wrote: @matthey Many 65XX variants had FPUs,

Which ones?
Quote:

65CE02 has 16bit stack pointer so you could have when combined with bank-swapping, a 64kb stack vs the old single page.

Bank-swapping a very modern and efficient technology...
Quote:

It also incorporated relocatable base page from the C128's MMU into a new B register that could be used as an extra register when not using base-page addressing.

You can only use it as a temporary registers for the accumulator, and nothing more.
Quote:

It added a 3rd indexing register (Z). Added 16bit addressing to all branches...

Nice additions.
Quote:

The SiP CSG 4510 is that system in a package that gives you the MMU to address 1MB.

With bank-switching...
Quote:

With 2 exta MMU's the C128 could access 1MB as well.

Guess what: iron soldering...
Quote:

Also added an AUG instruction to pass instructions to co-processors such as the MMU.

A very efficient method...
Quote:

As we know many 65XX clones used co-processors.

Which worked differently (for good reasons).
Quote:

Afterall, an Amiga with co-processors is just a slow and shitty Atari ST despite what relics like cdimauro would like to believe.

LOL Please tell me more about how fast is your beloved iron-soldered C128 with 64kB VDC.
Quote:

The cpu doesn't make the system. The co-processors do.

I reveal you a secret: it depends on the system. So, how the coprocessors worked. You need to pair a proper CPU to the chipset.

That's exactly the reason why a 68000 was a PERFECT match for the Amiga chipset (I don't know for the ST), as well as the 8-bit 65C816 was a perfect match for the SNES.

This if we only focus on videogames.

But if we've to support an OS and/or serious applications, then your crappy 65xx processors have no chance, at all, to compete even with a 68000.
Quote:

Only autistic weirdo's care about CISC 'programmer-friendly' assembly instruction sets. Most normal people use a higher level language for most coding.

According to what you've reported, you've used assembly language for your 65xx systems (C128, specifically).

It means that you're below normal, according to YOUR definition. And since 65xx assembly is for masochists, then you're even much below the normal.

Notice: I've just used YOUR definitions.
Quote:

All these cpu threads are a joke.

I agree. It's pointless to talk about your crappy 65xx, because even the guy that have built a big business with them recognized how crappy they are for more modern needs and recommended completely different processors.
Quote:

Move on! Until 68040, 68K had terrible IPC. That's why it never took over.

Well, you missed 68020 and 68030 which had very good and very competitive performance (good IPC + good frequencies = very good performance).
Quote:

When you divide that by the price - it wasn't worth it.

Why you haven't talked to the many companies that used them? They were all wrong right?
Quote:

Used 68060's on ebay are usually $250+... Why the heck would anyone want to build a retro-platform based on that? And that's just the cpu!

You clearly don't know the law of the supply and demand...
Quote:

"oh 68k is so elegant!"

The only right thing that you've written.
Quote:

I reveal you another secret: there are architectures which are more dead. Guess which ones...

@Lou

Quote:

Lou wrote: @matthey Just look at youtube. There are infinitely more channels dedicated to the Commodore 8bits than Amiga. So many new products have been released over the last 3 years and more keep coming. You can now connect a CDROM drive to a C64 for a few dollars via the tape drive and it's faster than the standard IEC port. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2AZ-xdJRUM Commodore's forward-thinking IEC port allows for infinite storage expansion. https://www.tfw8b.com/product/sd2iec-vic20-c64c-c128-light-grey/ Lumacode allows for rock-solid HMDI displays https://www.tindie.com/stores/c0pperdragon/ The Ultimate II+ and many other carts give the line REU ram, and a bazillion other features... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9o2-SL1-Ww There's wifi modems... https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=58

A corpse is a corpse and those tentative to reanimate it are silly, at least.
Quote:

The market couldn't be livelier, unlike the grumpy old men on this forum.

Sure, sure. In your world of illusion.
Quote:

But again, this thread is about showing how much Motorola sucked. Let's face it - IBM made the best PPC chips, not Motorola. In the LONG RUN - Motorola was a trash company.

No, this thread is about Commodore > Motorola: that's what YOU've tried to sell.

And since Commodore = MOS = 65xx, you're hopelessly trying to sell that 65xx are better than 68k as well.

Poor child! You don't like that the bad people break your toys, right?

However, the only good products that Commodore have produced on its own are the VIC-20 and C64. Even the Amiga came from an external company that was acquired, because Commodore wasn't able to produce anything else which was really valuable and competitive.

So, only two products which aren't sold anymore since long time. Even Amigas aren't sold anymore since long, but at least we got some semi-modern computers which set the stone on several markets.

Finally, and that's the most important thing, comparing Commodore and Motorola because hilarious.
In fact, the first produced some million of products in a short time span and then went bankrupt -> it's dead.
The second produced some billion 68k products in a very large time span and it's still working and alive, albeit it was acquired. And 68k processors are still delivered.

Now you can go to mum and: