multi-sourced uP

Are there any Arm cpus from different makers where the same packaging is used and enough of the pins are the same that you could use a common subset of the IO facilities offered by each chip?

I recall code to run on both Intel x86 and NEC V30 clones had to avoid using instructions that were specific to just the NEC clone.

Second sourcing seems to have almost disappeared now (as have many of the former smaller manufacturers either defunct or merged with others).

Here is a blast from the past for those who haven't seen it before -

Captain Zilog Z8000 takes on Dr Diabololicus (aka Motorola & Intel)

They didn't win and ISTR only Ollivetti with its M20 machine ever made a PC based on that chip. M24 was Intel based since by then they had won!

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Z80 was a huge success Z8000 sank without trace PDQ :(

Sinclair's QL did nothing at all for Motorola chip sales even though the machine itself was quite nice the microdrives were truly horrific. Who wants to own a computer with write only storage media?

It was vastly out sold by Amstrad's PC512 8086 box which came out at a couple of years later with a real floppy disk drive.

Was there ever a successful mass market machine 68k based?

Reply to
Martin Brown
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ISTR some of those Z80 derivatives did well in the embedded market. We had a soft spot for the 6809 and 6502.

They were to be fair moderately fast but had a tendency that was close to a near certainty to chew up any data or valuable files you stored on them. We made a peripheral that allowed the QL to interface to a proper disk drive but sales were never anything like worth the effort it took.

Remember that at the time using a cassette tape interface was the only other alternative for most home users. That really was slo-o--w.

Addons for the BBC micro were very profitable and for the QL not :(

Macintosh was never really mass market in the UK. We had one of the first ones over here and the laser printer to go with it. It was definitely more of a business machine here and (over)priced to match. Apple's USP is to charge more a premium for admittedly good hardware.

ISTR TI99k with its rather nice hardware sprite facility in the graphic coprocessor 9918 VDP had that market to a large extent.

Reply to
Martin Brown

The original Macintosh. For techies, the HP 9000s: 9816, 9826, and 9836 at least.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Reply to
Phil Hobbs

I used an Akai tape deck with 19.5 cm/sec for a 4-fold speedup. That took care of the loading speed, and searching was more convenient too.

There was also the Atari ST and the Amiga. So actually there was a substantial competition for Intel.

Groetjes Albert

Reply to
albert

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probably many more

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

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