Nightmaretony wrote:
Do not forget though that the largest marketplace for the 6500 series is embedded applications.
Further, don't forget that a 32-bit processor in WDC's current market space isn't going to yield all that many benefits either. For starters, there's no less than four times as many traces to place and route. That means increased board-related expenses, and really, THAT ultimately is what determines product price. Then there is the additional expense from extra memory chips, etc.
The point is, WDC promised a 32-bit processor as part of their Terbium lineup. The 65832 and 65T32 processors have both, heretofore, been vapor.
When Hifn announced but failed to deliver its 65000 (a completely unrelated product; this is a 1024-bit modular math coprocessor intended for hard real-time encryption applications), I thought that a dirty, underhanded tactic. I mean, I was in post-silicon verification -- why hadn't I heard of the 65000 before the public announcement? Shouldn't I have, especially since it was my job to test all the chips coming down the pike? It turned out that it was a deliberately planted fake, in an effort to influence (in this case, successfully) our competition into not making a competing product.
The idea was simple: if I'm the competitor, and it's taken me several years of effort to compete against Hifn's 6500 chip (the predecessor to the 65000), requiring several more, and at the same time, I see that a 65000 is coming out, with better instruction timings, wider integer paths (2048-bit in this case), and multiple cores on a die, then I've basically just wasted two years of effort. It'd have to be scrapped, everything retooled, and we'd end up going through another development cycle at the absolute minimum. Or, we'd realize that we can't compete in the space, and not even bother.
I consider this a dirty, underhanded, dishonest, unethical practice. In fact, everyone I've spoken to, both inside and outside the industry, considers such "anti-competition vapor" to be the epitome of dishonesty. If you announce, then you release. I accept that things can take upwards of five years of effort -- maybe more. But it has to come out *sometime*. Having regular progress reports would be awefully nice too.
The 65T32 is total vapor from an outsider's point of view. All indications seems to be that it was an anti-competitive posturing. Who was the competitor though? I can't think of anyone. Both PIC and Atmel have released 32-bit microcontrollers anyway. PowerPC and ColdFire have both taken off in the embedded space, some of which are actually 64-bit CPUs from what I hear. I understand that the Prius was Toyota's first non-65xx car computer system, because the 65xx series just wasn't up to the task of computing the fuzzy logic involved with its CVT. With automotive being the 65xx's current forte, you'd think that a 32-bit CPU would be high on their priority to fend off competition from PowerPC.
So, knowing that WDC didn't really have any competition to fend off (for all its competition
already had 32-bit products on the market), and knowing that the announcement of the 65T32 had a sizable number of people waiting for the product's release (judging by the number of Internet websites at the time which latched onto it), I consider the failure to deliver real silicon with a 32-bit 65xx core a major let-down to their customer base and, if I'm allowed to say it, their fans.
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Going for an FPGA as a processor would not make sense in industries seeking to lower costs all the way. since you have th load the buggers each time.
That isn't the problem. That takes maybe two to five seconds at best. My handheld GPS unit takes upwards of 45 seconds just to get to the boot-up progress screen!
The real problem is that a 32-bit architecture takes up real-estate, and the price of the product is directly proportional to the cost of the real-estate.
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We discussed that before, But for application, you know the handheld games that plug into your TV set that sell for maybe 10 bucks? You figure out the cost of this main controller chip, possibly less than a dollar in quantities. Plus you tap into people with experience in writing NES or SNES home games to easily migrate for using this. Would an FPGA processor make sense in this application? don't think so.
So, you're defending a company whose survival is essentially tied to a single industry? It seems that they're losing out in the automotive sector due to the math involved with CVT calculations, so instead of competing in that space, they've decided to focus on cheap, Chinese game units that nobody else wants?
That's hardly a strategy for long-term business success. In fact, if you read any business management book, regardless of how famous the author,
dependency is a real killer! A business needs to have
more than one significant customer -- it has to diversify its portfolio, so that fluctuations in one market do not affect availability or prices substantially.
When I acquired my collection of 65816 chips, they cost $6.00 or so each across the board. Today, they're almost $10! Why the price increase? It certainly isn't demand! It can only be one thing: their supplies are running low, and fabbing expenses are increasing due to lower sales volume. Their microcontroller offerings have also increased in cost substantially -- almost $28 for a single chip microcontroller? That's insane. Considering the capabilities you get in an FPGA of equal price, you're far better off with the FPGA. Considering that pinning a semiconductor is the dominant cost of the chip, and that FPGAs have
far greater pins than WDC's microcontrollers, I can't imagine any technical reason why WDC's microcontrollers are so astronomical in cost. The only remaining reason is, again, low sales volume.
OK, fine, WDC makes its dough on IP licensing. Now the question remains, does the 65T32 exist as an IP core? No indications exist that it does; if it did, you'd expect them to plaster their site with developer details on it.
So far as this outsider can see, WDC is supported, at any given time, by one major industry segment. When I purchased my chips, it was the automotive sector. Today, it appears to be uber-cheap Chinese game cores. If WDC came out with even a discrete $5.00 competitor to the ATmega-8 40-pin DIP package, complete with flash programmability, they'd have a throng of customers beating at their door so large that the building would threaten collapse. If they fixed that damn VIA serial-port bug, they'd have real solution to parallel computing in the embedded space right now (I'm not sure if the VIA's serial port appears in their $25+ microcontrollers; too lazy to look right now. But, IIRC, they didn't have anything which compared except a UART). What an embarrassment -- 30+ years, and the VIA's serial port bug still isn't fixed. Commodore's only reason for coming out with the 6526 was to fix that serial port bug (and then they didn't even use it in the Commodore 64! Oohh, for shame!).
If Mensch wants to retire, fine; I simply ask that he don't lie about it. But if he's interested in keeping the 65xx lineup not only alive but competitive as well, then he
must look into offering a competitive 32-bit offering as well. (And fix that damn serial port bug!)
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But overall, the primary business for WDC is the core ip for companies building in huge quanties with a low price point and wanting heavy reliability and low development time.
Well, you get heavy reliability from other architectures too. As far as development time is concerned, I'm overwhelmingly more productive on a 68000 than I am on a 65816, simply because I don't have to deal with pointer issues (do I use a 16-bit or 32-bit pointer? Do I allocate this in bank-0? Will there be any possibility of structures crossing a page- or bank-boundary? Oh crap, I need to widen the pointer from 16- to 24-bits; how will this affect critical timing? How will this change affect every other call-site to this procedure? How the
hell do I use object-oriented or functional-style programming with the 65816 without incurring a huge performance overhead? And on, and on).
I appreciate your sticking with the 65xx architecture, and it holds a large nostalgia value with me as well. That, and its affordable price, were the reasons I persued its application in the Kestrel. However, without a clear upgrade path to wider bus widths, combined with the increasing costs for discrete hardware, there exists no clear future for the processor lineup.