From: tse@foolish.apple.com (Gary Tse)
Subject: Re: 68050
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 22:34:06 GMT
Organization: Raoul Duke School of Pharmacology and Journalism

In article <1992Nov7.225117.4075@times.aux.apple.com> coolidge@apple.com writes:
>maynard@leah.msc.cornell.edu (Maynard J. Handley) writes:
>>>> no offense).  I was talking about speed in the sense of IBM RISC based
>>>> workstations that use IBM RISC chips.  Get the idea??? Joe C.
>>>
>>>And the R4000 or the Alpha aren't fast? The Intel P5 and P6 won't be
>>>fast? Motorola couldn't come out with another generation of chips that
>>>are as fast as the IBM RISC chips?
>
>>The RS6000 was here beginning of last year. Pentium isn't here yet, and
>>won't be close to an RS6K when it arrives. Alpha isn't here yet. R4000 is
>>here but all benchmarks I've seen put it at slower than an RS6K machine.
>>Sure Motorola could design a new faster chip. Why waste another two years.
>
>At the time of the alliance, the Alpha was either not announced or had
>been just announced. It probably was never in the running.

The Alpha 21064 sells for $1559 in quantities of 1000.  [10/7/92 
Microprocessor Report, so don't go screaming NDA at me.]  I can't 
envision plopping one of these in a mass market machine.  I suppose
you can pull in someone with lots of IC capacity (e.g. Motorola) to
drive down the cost with volume.  However, I would feel uncomfortable
betting the processor farm on DEC right now.  That I am a former DEC
employee probably has something to do with this discomfort.

>Politically, it would probably be impossible for Apple to base its
>next hardware generation on Intel processors. 

The P5 looks to be a pretty nice chip.  If history is any indication,
though, it's probably a pain to interface to.

>The R4000 is a nice
>chip, but at the time there were grave doubts about MIPS' survival. In
>addition, MIPS (even now) has nowhere near the resources to pour into
>chip design that IBM does. 

If I were Apple, I'd just go ahead and buy MIPSCo if I were 
interested in using their processor.  Hey, didn't someone else do 
just that?  [Rhetorical question.  I happen to have a lot of friends
at SGI (nee MIPS).]

>The Sparc might have been a decent
>alternative, but in mid-1991 the Sparc was mired in uncertainty. Even
>now, the Sparc line is pretty sluggish comparatively. Finally, HP's
>Precision Architecture line might have been interesting -- it's fast,
>it exists now, and it sells pretty well. The decision to go with IBM
>rather than HP certainly had marketing/political considerations;
>technically, they're both not too bad.

It's a good question why Apple went with PowerPC rather than some
version of SPARC or PA.  I was happily designing R4000 based machines
elsewhere when that decision was made.  So mostly I don't know.  What
I do know, I probably can't say in a public forum.  

>As for Motorola, the 680x0 line clearly has potential, but it's taking
>too long to mature. The 88xxx line is more interesting, but again
>there were grave doubts about Motorola's ability to scale the line
>fast enough to compete with other RISC processor lines.

Well, it's not clear to me that Apple is, or for that matter should be,
worried about raw performance.  Price/performance is probably much more
important.  The 88110 is competitive with the estimated P5 performance.
You'd figure with the Ford deal Motorola would be able to drive the cost
of the '110 way down.  So why not the 88k?  

-- 
Gary Tse, tse@Apple.COM		"The fascination of what's difficult",
(408) 862-5452  		    The wish to do what one's not done before,
				Is the proper card to show at Heaven's door.