On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 12:22:34AM -0500, ZN wrote: > Actually, the biggest problem with the 68k family is that Mot. does not > want to sell the licence to anyone else, so that even FPGA cores that > implement the same instruction set are, strictly speaking, illegal. > Besides, there are compatible (or close enough) CPUs based on the 68k > manufactured using .25u process, the V4 ColdFire. Even here we have a > problem, which is Mot. dawdling over making the chips more freely > available. They are targetted at the embedded OEM market and get 'compiled' > to order along with peripherals. HP uses them profusely in their printers, > for instance, because Mot. gladly maks speciffic versions that reduce the > printer to 2 chips. > The validity of the 68k concept is certainly obvios, otherwise it would > have died a long time ago. Instead, an attempt to reduce the instruction > set in the previous generation ColdFire's has been all but reversed with > the new ones, which can be made almost completely compatible - if you can > get Mot. to sell them to you!
not yet compatible enough for our purposes. Even if they were, the emulation of the missing instructions can have serious impact on performance. They probably loose half of their potential markets because of the silly incompability. Bye Richard
