> PPC offered tremendous promise in the early 1990s at the same time Motorola's evolution of M68k was lackluster at best
Apple entered into a trio with IBM & Motorola to develop the PowerPC in early 90's.
But at that time, there already was MIPS around.
Anyone know why this PowerPC project was started despite that? Especially if -per the article- the main goal was to move from CISC to RISC?
Even if MIPS cpus around at the time had performance/W issues (I've no idea yes or no), then improving technology for existing ISA would be easier than inventing entire new architecture, no? (+ all the software tools)
And there was also SPARC then.
So why invent new wheel, vs. improve MIPS (or SPARC) & use that? Not-invented-here syndrome? Licensing issues?
PowerPC was not really an entirely new architecture, it was a downsized implementation of the POWER architecture which IBM had already been shipping in workstations for a few years.
They AIM alliance also wanted to end the Wintel Duopoly. Adopting SPARC would help out Sun Microsystems, which I believe was the leader in workstations at the time.
MIPS was to be used as one of the 'standard' reference platforms for the Advanced Computing Environment[0] or Advanced RISC Computing (?) (the other being X86), that would run Windows NT.
IBM and a lot of systems that had been 68K. Though the architectures were different a lot of 68K assumptions were maintained in the PPC so porting was easier.
Apple entered into a trio with IBM & Motorola to develop the PowerPC in early 90's.
But at that time, there already was MIPS around.
Anyone know why this PowerPC project was started despite that? Especially if -per the article- the main goal was to move from CISC to RISC?
Even if MIPS cpus around at the time had performance/W issues (I've no idea yes or no), then improving technology for existing ISA would be easier than inventing entire new architecture, no? (+ all the software tools)
And there was also SPARC then.
So why invent new wheel, vs. improve MIPS (or SPARC) & use that? Not-invented-here syndrome? Licensing issues?