BillO wrote:
Not to dis BDD, but Conexant sold it's Rockwell IP and the Mexico fabrication plant to NXP in 2008. However, the deal did not go through until August of the year. This is all very confusing. We have no proof that 65C02s were not manufactured under the Rockwell brand, either by Conexant or by NXP, after the Rockwell name and logo went up for grabs. It's all just speculation.
Right. I point out the sale to Conexant and my discovery of a Conexant-marked R65C02P3 not to say that BDD is absolutely correct there, but to say I've found a bit of independent evidence that adds some plausibility to his claim.
And I can also see why vendors might remark parts just to change the manufacturer name; of three major forms of the 6502 (NMOS, R65C02 and W65C02) Rockwell seems the best-known brand name for R65C02s (I'd never even heard of Conexant before these threads in this forum) and it could well be that many beginners have a strong preference to buy "Rockwell" parts over others.
Sure, those of us with the knowledge and the time are not going to trust any of the labels now and use technical means to qualify the individual chips we're using when we're not buying new stock WDC parts, but that's a fair amount of work, and it is nice to have some heuristics to (we hope) increase our chances of getting the thing we want when ordering from random cheap sources on the 'net.
But yeah, it would be nice to have some more definitive information on what real markings actually existed and got shipped.
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I know it's easy to brand "those guy's" as criminals, but we just don't know enough to paint them all with the same brush.
Well, and as usual it just takes one bad guy in the supply chain to mess things up. For a retail vendor, doing full qualification of every chip you receive is expensive and probably puts you into a different price bracket and, thus, market. I don't immediately blame the guy who sold me a chip when it turns out to be mislabeled or otherwise broken.