Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
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PPC is dead for the desktop market since 2007, and now a process has started to corner it in its new domains. ARM won't reach the high-end segments in these markets until the next generation of CPU's of course,
Cortex-A15 is due this year...
PPC did have its own high-end embedded niche but A8 and A9 have now got a big chunk of that level of performance. A15 looks like it'll finish the job.
Freescale in particular pretty much owned automotive and had a big chunk of networking but a lot of the ARM guys are chasing these now.
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but I am convinced this marks the beginning of a new way of reasoning over at Freescale, the start of a process towards a new era. Freescale isn't immune to costs, and why keep developing two architectures, costing twice as much, if you could manage all your needs with just one?
It's nothing new. They did have several different ISAs (ARM, Coldfire, 68K, PPC, 8-bit) until fairly recently but they have been replacing their designs with ARM based designs for some time now.
It's got to the point where there's really no advantage in designing your own CPU any more unless it's something really exotic or special (like console CPUs). It's far easier and cheaper just to license a design. That way you get a chip that you can still tweak but you don't have to worry about developing a compiler or apps or whatever.
