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http://www.atariage....ost__p__1862392
kskunk, on Sat Oct 17, 2009 6:20 AM, said:
(As an aside, there's some history around the 68020 and second-sources. Motorola knew that all the 68K suppliers were hurting their bottom line/ability to gouge customers. So they formed an alliance with Toshiba as the exclusive 68020 second-source. It was alleged that Toshiba got the deal by fixing prices. Motorola's traditional partners took them to court, in vain, trying to get the 020 masks. Some think Motorola's unwillingness to play fair killed off the 68K as a serious contender in the processor wars. Motorola's next big endeavor, PowerPC, was almost ridiculously open with the inclusion of many suppliers, partners, and licensing options. That may be why all three major consoles are using it today...)
And my question is:
If various competitive 3rd party manufacturers of the 68000 (Signetics, ST, Hitachi, etc, etc) couldn't get licenses for later 68k architecture chips, (aside from taking Motorola to court) why didn't they invest in developing their own updated chips to compete with the '020/030/etc (be it full in-house design, reverse engineering, hybrid clone/in-house designs, etc -like the various x86 chips done by NEC, AMD, and Cyrix in mid 80s and early 90s -or at least more modest enhancements of the 68000), or, short of even modest updates to the 68k core, why didn't any of those competitors just push faster and faster clocked vanilla 68000s in the late 80s and early 90s? (another thing that some x86 vendors did -AMD and Harris with 20 and 25 MHz 286s, AMD with the extremely popular AM386DX-40, AMD again with the 5x86, etc, etc -something usually done when said manufacturer couldn't get a full new design online or at least not on the market soon enough)
