> 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.

On that topic, there's an interesting article from 3 days ago that reads:

"Kaivan Karimi, head of strategy and business development for Freescale's microcontroller business, explains. "When I joined the company in 2003, we had 21 different chip architectures to support. The goal then was to bring it down to 14," Karimi said. But now that number is three. [...] The two most important of its remaining chip architectures are Power and ARM. [...] Freescale has dropped a lot of its dead-end chip architectures in favor of ARM [...]"

The third of the 3 architectures to be kept besides Power and ARM is probably ColdFire. Do you know what the other 18 architectures are that were still being actively supported by Freescale a decade ago? I didn't know it were that much.

Some comments on other statements from that article:

"The more recent change has been to ARM, which Freescale has embraced with full force after Motorola fought it for years. [...] Freescale hasn't always been in love with ARM."

Odd statement. Motorola acquired its ARM license in 2000, so 4 years before it spun out Freescale, and released its first ARM chips (i.MX1) in 2001.

"Geoff Lees, Freescale's new general manager for microcontroller products, says his company is well-suited to play in the ARM world, which is moving rapidly toward more muscular 32-bit processing cores. [...] "We still do have products based on other architectures, but virtually 100 percent of our research and development is directed toward 32-bit ARM-based (chips)," Lees said."

That surely doesn't sound too good for the future of Power Architecture at Freescale. Am I the only one who senses somewhat of a contradiction here to the previous "two most important of its remaining chip architectures are Power and ARM" statement made in that same article?