Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[regnirps@aol.com (Regnirps)]

>toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) wrote:


>supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes:

>You should also explain why, when the only significant design win for ARM
>was the "British Mac" Archimedes academic workstation, and Motorola was
>majorly pushing the 68K forward into both unix workstations and telecom
>devices (especially the comm devices because that's where the volume was),
>Apple would have seriously considered the ARM _just_ _because_ its first
>parts had slightly better MIPS numbers than the 68k and was designed by
>ex-6502 users (Acorn, the makers of the 6502 based BBC micro).

Its prety simple. Same instruction set architacture as 6502 (one address, or as
they say now days, " load store" ), processor status flags match 6502, built in
barrel shifter, 16 registers (32 if you count supervisor set meant for OS use)
and very fast interrupt response. Super fast 6502 emulation.

The Archemedes was not a design win, the ARM was designed for the Arch and as
processor upgrade for the BBC micro.

>>ARM was originally a 6Mhz 32-bit RISC chip.  Today, chips of
>>this family run hundreds of times faster.

>ARM was not taken seriously anywhere outside of Britain for a decade.
>ARM stalled at 25-33 Mhz for years, while every other desktop chip
>soared past it. Unlike the others, ARM was not owned by a semiconductor
>company with internal interests in using the CPU performance curve to
>sell other product containing that CPU.

Lets be fair here, you say they have no design wins then complain they were
behind the speed curve. Is it the wagon or the horse? Besides, they had plenty
of action in the low power embedded market. Now they are everywhere. If Apple
had chosen the ARM, the performance would have kept pace.

The Apple project was of course secret, but if you had worked there you would
have known about it