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Motorola To Spin Off Chip Division
dafz1 writes "According to an article
at CNET News, Motorola
has announced they will create a new company from their Semiconductor Products
Sector (SPS), which builds chips such as the PowerPC. Reasons cited include 'surrendering to IBM a key role in delivering the PowerPC for Apple Computer's top-of-the-line desktop'. This follows earlier news that Motorola's CEO will step down, citing a 'difference
of opinion' with fellow executives."
in this, but from what I have gathered, Motorola was the prime reason Apple chips fell behind, Moto and Co. simply weren't interested (or up to the task?) in producing new chips for them.
With a new division spun off, perhaps this will change?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Years ago I was talking to some of the semi guys, and they were royally pissed at MOTO corporate for screwing them over, funding-wise. The PPC division was always paranoid that they were getting screwed because Moto lost big $$ when Apple shut down the Mac clones way back when.
Basically, they believed Moto corporate was sandbagging the PPC to "screw Apple."
One thing for sure, they definitely need better cooks for the broth. They've seem to forgotten how to make chips.
It's seems likely to me that Motorolla did not want to use it's own semiconductors in it's communications business. But doing so would, in essence, be a vote of no confidence in their own semiconductor business.
By spinning off their semi-conductor biz and framing it as a move to meet demands from other customers, they are able to ditch their processors without outright killing their semiconductor business.
If the spinoff does poorly, they'll quietly kill it later. If it does well, they'll either start using their products again or sell it off for a big profit.
It's sad to see Motorolla leaving the chip business though. :-(
What's to become of Metrowerks?
Presumably it will follow the semiconductor division [since a CPU ain't worth diddly-squat without a compiler], but maybe they want to keep you so that you can write a compiler for their cellphone operating systems?
Have you heard yet?
Motorola has done a horrible job of marketing their technology over the years, from the failed and forgotten AIM (Apple, IBM, and Motorola) alliance (remember? Taligent? "Pink"? Yeah, me neither...) to their more recent "Digital DNA" (I still don't know what that meant) marketing campaign.
What does Motorola do? As far as the rest of the world is concerned, they make cellphones and stuff. People hear about the PowerMac from Apple, and occasionally the PowerPC from IBM, but they hear nothing that makes sense out of Motorola. Hopefully this will change, for their sake.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The G3 chips that Apple still uses (ibooks) have been made by IBM for some time now.
Ithe rumor mills claim great things in store for the IBM G3s in future generations (including altivec support) and ever increased efficiency. I would guess in the next year or so, when Apple roughly predicted a G5 powerbook, we will see everything switch to G5 or these next generation G3 chips.
These super efficient and powerful G3 chips might lead to more fun machines like the fanless cube and iMac... let alone great news for ibook users.
That whiz-bang Opteron/Itanium is Backwards compatible to the Pentium II MMX/K6-2, which is backwards compatible to the 80486, which is backwards compatible to the 386+387, which is backwards compatible to the 286+287, which is backwards compatible to the 8086+8087, which is backwards compatible to the 8080, which is backwards compatible to the 8008, which is backwards compatible to the 4004, which was designed for use in a pocket calculator. Likewise, that VIA K7VMM is backwards compatible to the PC JR and Win XP is backwards compatible (to some degree) to QDOS.
Because I do not use legacy binary-only software, I do not need my machine to be backwards compatible to run old DOS programs etc. Some things can be done much more efficiently with an architecture designed with modern features in mind from the start. I would love to get my hands on sizeable quantities of PPC G5 workstations, but because of economies of scale & microsoft's stranglehold, the only architechture available at a reasonable price from multiple vendors is the descendants of the IBM PC.
I understand what you are saying too. I do have a mono phone that I use for talking & text messages. The nice thing about text messages is that it can be delivered late, not phone calls. How can you depend on a system that is not dependable? I expect that all my calls are going to come through to me not too look down at my phone and see 1 missed call when it did not ring. Could it be the phone? Probably, my problem is not only with missed calls but dropped calls. I can also understand each cell site can have X amount of people and if I am transferring sites and it happens to be full, tough I get dropped.
Yeah cool, bring additional features, fix what you have first and then add on. Otherwise you are going to end up Windows XP, an OS that is nearly 2+ gb to install where most of the code is patches to existing problems.
alias dir='rm -rf