Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12134 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> AFAIK Coldfire only had one major customer and they switched to
> ARM a while back. At a guess I'd say it'll be a DSP.
The latest release of new ColdFire chips was announced in
May 2011. But as that was almost two years ago, you may be right that there won't be any new ColdFire development, and that the third architecture to be kept besides Power and ARM could be the StarCore DSP family. It's a pity that the article isn't clear about that.
> 8 bit
> 16 bit
> 68K
> 88K
> Mcore
> Coldfire
> ARM
> PPC
> Several DSP variants...
This would be 13 DSP variants then. Besides, I have my doubts about 88k being actively supported in 2003 ;-)
I did some research and think this may be how Freescale arrived at its "
21 different chip architectures" figure for 2003:
PPC, 68k, ColdFire, ARM, MCORE, DSP56300, DSP56600, DSP56800, StarCore MSC711x, StarCore MSC8100, M68HC05, M68HC08, M68HC11, M68HC12, M68HC16, HCS12, C-Port, MC4472xA, S1 family (MPC1xx)
Okay, that's just 19, not 21 ;-) And of course it's highly debatable if that's really all *different* architectures or more like subarchitectures in some cases. But I really see no other possibility than including subarchitectures for Freescale having actively supported the number of "chip architectures" they supposedly have.
> I'd take it to mean they'll do new chips while they have customers
> for them but they'll not develop any new cores.
That would be a strange meaning as they surely won't develop their own ARM cores, yet "virtually 100 percent of [their] research and development is directed toward 32-bit ARM-based (chips)". R&D-wise, developing new Power Architecture chips around their own existing Power Architecture cores is surely not too different from developing new ARM chips around existing ARM cores licensed from ARM Ltd. Thus, I'm still of the opinion that Freescale's ongoing development of Power Architecture chips (which I'm sure we can consider to be fact) contradicts the above-quoted statement ...unless it's really referring solely to microarchitecture development and Freescale is secretly developing its own ARM core right now, which I doubt.
> IIRC the new 64 bit core is based on a G3.
No,
you have said that before, but it's not. The e6500 is (via e5500, e500mc and e500v2) a descendant of the e500v1 (called just e500 back then), which was no descendant or derivative of the 74x/75x microarchitecture but a from-scratch implementation of the Book E spec done around 2001.
> they haven't done anything really new in a very long time, just tweaks.
I think the e6500 and its ancestor e500v1 are really worlds apart, even if it were "just tweaks" that led from the one to the other.
> They could co-develop PPC and ARM SoCs so all they have to do is
> drop in whatever cores the market requires.
Yes, that's what the announced
QorIQ Layerscape product line will be all about.