Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 874 from 2007/4/9
From: Kingston upon ...
Quote:
Other improbable scenarios?
First that the Chinese reverse engineered the 68060. Hitachi managed to reverse engineer the 6809 when they produced the 6309, but the Chinese haven't got a lot to motivate them to attempt this.
Second, that Motorola would license their product and that their spun off successor would be unaware of the arrangement.
Third, that the Chinese would be allowed to produce chips beginning with the MC designation indicating Motorola manufacture.
I don't see any other viable answer to the origin of these chips other then their being re-labeled 75Mhz components.
I'm not sure that the 'MC' designation would be so controlled. Motorolla produced MC68xxx, PC68xxx and XC68xxx chips before the freescale era.
The 'trademark' in question is more the big 'M' - a copyrighted Motorolla trademark.
The confusing thing for me is - why would anyone bother reverse engineering a 68060? They weren't massively popular on the desktop (Draco and top expansions aside - there were no native Apple 68060 based machines), there are a few switches out there based on ec060s, and probably some small segment of the embedded market (68K is still popular).
But there was no era of dominance for 68060 (therefore no massive market to support with spares, no massive embedded firmware/reference design library (specific to 68060) to support) - and any market requiring a higher-end 68060 would have quickly moved on to PPC.
So where's the market? What justifies development of a higher-clocked 68060 in >2008?
[ Edited by boot_wb 05.06.2011 - 12:47 ]www.hullchimneyservices.co.uk
UI: Powerbook 5,6 (1.67GHz, 128MB VRam): OS3.1, OSX 10.5.8
HTPC: Mac Mini G4 (1,5GHz, 64MB VRam): OS3.1 (ZVNC)
Audiophile: Efika 5200b (SB Audigy): OS3.1 (VNC + Virtual Monitor)
Windows free since 2011!
