multi-sourced uP...

[Jasen Betts]

On 2023-03-07, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

My late father (he passed several years before Covid) used to bring up
that in boot camp at Fort Benning back in \'44 they\'d give them like 8
vaccines in one day. Boots and raincoats only was vaccine-day uniform,
who knows why but that\'s supposedly how it was.

A raincoat wouldn\'t help him bare his arm at all. I\'m guessing the
injections were into other muscle.

--
Jasen.
🇺🇦 Слава Україні

 

[Clive Arthur]

On 08/03/2023 08:34, Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2023-03-07, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

My late father (he passed several years before Covid) used to bring up
that in boot camp at Fort Benning back in \'44 they\'d give them like 8
vaccines in one day. Boots and raincoats only was vaccine-day uniform,
who knows why but that\'s supposedly how it was.

A raincoat wouldn\'t help him bare his arm at all. I\'m guessing the
injections were into other muscle.

Raincoat or not, as a proud US citizen he\'d have a right to bare arms.

--
Cheers
Clive

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 8 Mar 2023 11:40:01 +0000) it happened Clive Arthur
<clive@nowaytoday.co.uk> wrote in <tu9s6j$t0dp$1@dont-email.me>:

On 08/03/2023 08:34, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2023-03-07, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

My late father (he passed several years before Covid) used to bring up
that in boot camp at Fort Benning back in \'44 they\'d give them like 8
vaccines in one day. Boots and raincoats only was vaccine-day uniform,
who knows why but that\'s supposedly how it was.

A raincoat wouldn\'t help him bare his arm at all. I\'m guessing the
injections were into other muscle.


Raincoat or not, as a proud US citizen he\'d have a right to bare arms.

That includes nukes too !

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, March 8, 2023 at 10:56:09 PM UTC+11, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Wed, 8 Mar 2023 11:40:01 +0000) it happened Clive Arthur
cl...@nowaytoday.co.uk> wrote in <tu9s6j$t0dp$1...@dont-email.me>:
On 08/03/2023 08:34, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2023-03-07, bitrex <us...@example.net> wrote:

My late father (he passed several years before Covid) used to bring up
that in boot camp at Fort Benning back in \'44 they\'d give them like 8
vaccines in one day. Boots and raincoats only was vaccine-day uniform,
who knows why but that\'s supposedly how it was.

A raincoat wouldn\'t help him bare his arm at all. I\'m guessing the
injections were into other muscle.


Raincoat or not, as a proud US citizen he\'d have a right to bare arms.

That includes nukes too !

Not really. Even the US National Rifle Association draws the line that,

For one thing the arms manufacturers who support them don\'t make nuclear weapons, and if they did there aren\'t enough Americans rich enough to buy nuclear weapons to make it a market worth lobbying for.

Still, somebody who believes in the Le Sage corpuscular theory of gravity is silly enough to believe anything.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Martin Brown]

On 07/03/2023 19:49, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:

tirsdag den 7. marts 2023 kl. 20.39.05 UTC+1 skrev whit3rd:
On Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 7:31:35 AM UTC-8, John Larkin wrote:
Does anyone know of a multi-sourced uP, ever?
Sure; Macintosh computers used Motorola and Hitachi CPUs and even
Rockwell interchangeably for a while, in the 68000 days, and the
later PowerPC chips had IBM and Motorola sources... but that didn\'t
last long.

RiscV gives hope of a future \'standard\'; China\'s clone-it factories
might be doing true second-source today, how would one know?

that wouldn\'t be any more second source than ARM is, In both cases
the core is the same but peripherals, memory, and pinout, is all over
the place for different manufacturers.

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M20

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?

--
Martin Brown

 

[Don Y]

On 3/9/2023 2:28 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

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?

If so, it\'s just a fluke. Note that it\'s hard to decide where \"I/O\"
begins and \"CPU\" ends with many ARMs. It\'s a lego-block approach to
designing a part... no gurantee that vendor A and vendor B will happen upon
the same set of *features*, let alone implementation!

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.

The same was true with one of the Z80 work-alikes. But, the differences
were very subtle (e.g., condition codes on a few instructions).

And, of course, the \"Rabbit\" people thought they had a better approach
to the Z80. Don\'t see much future, there!

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

There\'s no longer an incentive to have multiple sources. In the 70\'s, it
was almost a requirement (\"What happens if I can\'t get product from *you*?
And, how do I keep pricing pressure on you so you don\'t rake me over the
coals once you\'ve got a design-in? -- acknowledging the fact that it takes
a boatload of effort -- with 70\'s technology -- to port to a different
processor\")

Folks who\'ve adopted more portable design methodologies now realize that
design cycles can be turned faster and without major rewrites/refactors
of the basic system design/code. And, even small processors can benefit
from the abstractions that HLLs afford to ease the dependency.

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M20

Z80 was a huge success Z8000 sank without trace PDQ

Z280? Z380? Z80,000??

The Z180 (aka 64180) had a reasonable showing as it acknowledged the
fact that many designs weren\'t MIPS bound but, rather, address-space
bound. Being able to *seemlessly* deploy a 500KB binary on an 8b
(actually, the Z80 is a 4b ALU) processor was a big win if the alternative
was a 16b processor (with increased costs for the memory subsystem).

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?

Were those the little tape? \"lozenges\" Only marginally faster
than writing everything down on paper with a pencil...?

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?

Can you spell Macintosh? Later models moved up the processor hierarchy.
IIRC, NeXT was also 68K -- but I think an 030 or 040 (?)

It saw a lot of use in arcade pieces and (consumer) game consoles -- likely
one of the larger markets, at the time.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 09/03/2023 10:41, Don Y wrote:

On 3/9/2023 2:28 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

Z80 was a huge success Z8000 sank without trace PDQ

Z280?  Z380?  Z80,000??

The Z180 (aka 64180) had a reasonable showing as it acknowledged the
fact that many designs weren\'t MIPS bound but, rather, address-space
bound.  Being able to *seemlessly* deploy a 500KB binary on an 8b
(actually, the Z80 is a 4b ALU) processor was a big win if the alternative
was a 16b processor (with increased costs for the memory subsystem).

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

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?

Were those the little tape? \"lozenges\"  Only marginally faster
than writing everything down on paper with a pencil...?

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

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?

Can you spell Macintosh?  Later models moved up the processor hierarchy.
IIRC, NeXT was also 68K -- but I think an 030 or 040 (?)

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.

It saw a lot of use in arcade pieces and (consumer) game consoles -- likely
one of the larger markets, at the time.

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

--
Martin Brown

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2023-03-09 04:28, Martin Brown wrote:

On 07/03/2023 19:49, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:
tirsdag den 7. marts 2023 kl. 20.39.05 UTC+1 skrev whit3rd:
On Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 7:31:35 AM UTC-8, John Larkin wrote:
Does anyone know of a multi-sourced uP, ever?
Sure; Macintosh computers used Motorola and Hitachi CPUs and even
Rockwell interchangeably for a while, in the 68000 days, and the
later PowerPC chips had IBM and Motorola sources... but that didn\'t
last long.

RiscV gives hope of a future \'standard\'; China\'s clone-it factories
might be doing true second-source today, how would one know?

that wouldn\'t be any more second source than ARM is, In both cases
the core is the same but peripherals, memory, and pinout, is all over
the place for different manufacturers.

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M20

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?

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

Cheers

Phil Hobbs



--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Don Y]

On 3/9/2023 5:08 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 09/03/2023 10:41, Don Y wrote:
On 3/9/2023 2:28 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

Z80 was a huge success Z8000 sank without trace PDQ

Z280?  Z380?  Z80,000??

The Z180 (aka 64180) had a reasonable showing as it acknowledged the
fact that many designs weren\'t MIPS bound but, rather, address-space
bound.  Being able to *seemlessly* deploy a 500KB binary on an 8b
(actually, the Z80 is a 4b ALU) processor was a big win if the alternative
was a 16b processor (with increased costs for the memory subsystem).

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

ISTR the 6502 is popular in certain munitions (?). It\'s beauty is that
it is such a *tiny* core, simple instruction set, etc.

OTOH, because it is so boring, folks aren\'t usually interested in using it!

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?

Were those the little tape? \"lozenges\"  Only marginally faster
than writing everything down on paper with a pencil...?

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.

Dunno. Worked with a firm in Manchester and they used them in
their \"PCs\" (whatever those were, at that time). I was amused
by the -- lack of -- speed (I was using an early 386 at the time)

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

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?

Can you spell Macintosh?  Later models moved up the processor hierarchy.
IIRC, NeXT was also 68K -- but I think an 030 or 040 (?)

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.

Yup. I had an LJ IINTX \"way back when\". Head and shoulders above the
(dot matrix) competition; but just as high above in terms of *price*! :<

It saw a lot of use in arcade pieces and (consumer) game consoles -- likely
one of the larger markets, at the time.

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

Actually, no -- at least not for the arcade market. Most often, an 8b
processor with extra hardware to expedite display handling -- a custom
BLTer, hardware scrolling, etc.

IIRC, Atari (?) even made a vector processor that could *only* draw
curves! (of course, a normal vector monitor tends to be driven with
straight line segments) So, things like the score always looked like
they were drawn \"artsy fartsy\" (even a \'1\' was curved).

[In that era, you often bumped into competitors in chip design centers;
and tried hard not to seem like you were snooping on their work! :> ]

The 9918 could only handle 16 (?) sprites -- and they were of limited
size. Their implementation didn\'t scale well (I designed an object based
display controller, around that time, that could use objects of arbitrary
size and was limited by the frame buffer\'s bandwidth and would handle
collision detection, as well) so you could only do trivial games.
(e.g., having 100 objects in motion means hardware to handle 16 of them
is \"close but no cigar\")

The home consoles were a mixed bag as each manufacturer took a different
approach to the hardware.

The C64 used a modified 6502. It was the biggest seller, IIRC. The
Atari 2600 used yet another 6502 variant -- as did the 7800 (amusing to
see the originality in Atari\'s model numbers, eh?). And, the NES used
a 2A03.

The Vectrex was 6809-based. (for its day, the 6809 was pretty capable...
if you can live with the \"single accumulator\" programming model)

Coleco Vision was Z80-based.

Intellivision used a CP1600 (16bit!)

The Sega Genesis had a 68K *and* a Z80 as a sound processor. (this
was more in tune with the way arcade pieces were designed; offload
the boring stuff to another processor so the main processor could
concentrate on moving more objects around!)

[I\'m ignoring the many dogs that were released...]

 

[none]

In article <tuci7b$1e7rg$1@dont-email.me>,
Martin Brown <\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 09/03/2023 10:41, Don Y wrote:
On 3/9/2023 2:28 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

Z80 was a huge success Z8000 sank without trace PDQ

Z280?  Z380?  Z80,000??

The Z180 (aka 64180) had a reasonable showing as it acknowledged the
fact that many designs weren\'t MIPS bound but, rather, address-space
bound.  Being able to *seemlessly* deploy a 500KB binary on an 8b
(actually, the Z80 is a 4b ALU) processor was a big win if the alternative
was a 16b processor (with increased costs for the memory subsystem).

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

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?

Were those the little tape? \"lozenges\"  Only marginally faster
than writing everything down on paper with a pencil...?

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.

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.

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

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?

Can you spell Macintosh?  Later models moved up the processor hierarchy.
IIRC, NeXT was also 68K -- but I think an 030 or 040 (?)

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.

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

It saw a lot of use in arcade pieces and (consumer) game consoles -- likely
one of the larger markets, at the time.

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

--
Martin Brown

Groetjes Albert
--
Don\'t praise the day before the evening. One swallow doesn\'t make spring.
You must not say \"hey\" before you have crossed the bridge. Don\'t sell the
hide of the bear until you shot it. Better one bird in the hand than ten in
the air. First gain is a cat spinning. - the Wise from Antrim -

 

[Lasse Langwadt Christensen]

torsdag den 9. marts 2023 kl. 10.28.27 UTC+1 skrev Martin Brown:

On 07/03/2023 19:49, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:
tirsdag den 7. marts 2023 kl. 20.39.05 UTC+1 skrev whit3rd:
On Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 7:31:35 AM UTC-8, John Larkin wrote:
Does anyone know of a multi-sourced uP, ever?
Sure; Macintosh computers used Motorola and Hitachi CPUs and even
Rockwell interchangeably for a while, in the 68000 days, and the
later PowerPC chips had IBM and Motorola sources... but that didn\'t
last long.

RiscV gives hope of a future \'standard\'; China\'s clone-it factories
might be doing true second-source today, how would one know?

that wouldn\'t be any more second source than ARM is, In both cases
the core is the same but peripherals, memory, and pinout, is all over
the place for different manufacturers.
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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M20

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:68k_Macintosh_computers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-92_series

probably many more