-
Hello MLAers! We've re-enabled auto-approval for accounts. If you are still waiting on account approval, please check this thread for more information.
Power macintosh g4
- Thread starter john
- Start date
I think at this point nobody is at all clear what question there is left outstanding to answer. If your question just boils down to "Did any Motorola-branded PowerPC processors physically come out of a factory owned by Motorola instead of IBM then the answer is probably yes. I only say "probably" because by the mid-90's many traditional silicon design companies were selling off their manufacturing assets to become "fabless" IP-only shops. However, I'm fairly certain Motorola was still in the business of stamping out silicon up until at least some time after the Freescale breakup.
(Conversely, IBM was still big into owning fabs in the 90's and 20-aughts, which is why there are many examples of chips "made" by other companies that came from IBM factories. For instance, most of Cyrix's 90's CPU designs.)
(Conversely, IBM was still big into owning fabs in the 90's and 20-aughts, which is why there are many examples of chips "made" by other companies that came from IBM factories. For instance, most of Cyrix's 90's CPU designs.)
Last edited by a moderator:
By joining the AIM alliance Motorola had "permission". That was the whole point, and this was explained earlier in the thread"
IE, if Motorola hadn't gotten "permission" to use POWER ISA from IBM they wouldn't have been making PowerPC CPUs. Period.
In return for providing the POWER ISA IBM got Motorola to do the dirty work creating cheaper, low-end POWER-based products that IBM could promote as competitors to, ironically enough, IBM PC-compatible computers, a market that IBM had utterly lost control of by the early 1990's. IBM didn't "independently" condense their workstation/server version of POWER into a single-chip CPU until 1996.
Just out of curiosity, and without being rude, why do you care?
Motorola, at least the Motorola that was involved with all of this, no longer exists. It's buried several layers deep in Qualcomm (at least it will be) as Motorola spun off their semiconductor business as Freescale Semiconductor, which was then bought by NXP Semiconductor, which is in the process of being bought by Qualcomm.
Any questions relating to who owns what would be best served by a trip through Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
The 88110 is not a PowerPC product, though it is a RISC processor. It was developed by Motorola before the AIM alliance was created (again, credit to Wikipedia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC88110
Motorola, at least the Motorola that was involved with all of this, no longer exists. It's buried several layers deep in Qualcomm (at least it will be) as Motorola spun off their semiconductor business as Freescale Semiconductor, which was then bought by NXP Semiconductor, which is in the process of being bought by Qualcomm.
Any questions relating to who owns what would be best served by a trip through Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
The 88110 is not a PowerPC product, though it is a RISC processor. It was developed by Motorola before the AIM alliance was created (again, credit to Wikipedia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC88110
Yes, this. What hair are you trying to split here? I kind of feel like this isn't that hard.
Here is a PowerPC whitepaper from Freescale that has a nice capsule history of FreeScale/Motorola's PowerPC products, but here's why I'm posting it; this is what is says on the Copyright page:
QED.
*sound of hair being pulled out*
YES.
If you've now decided that you don't want to count anything PowerPC as a "Motorola" CPU because of the ISA license (which isn't really fair, because Motorola employees actually did most of the nuts-and-bolts design work on many members of the PowerPC family despite having licensed the core intellectual property from IBM) then fine: "Coldfire" CPUs, which are modified/streamlined relations of the 680x0 family (which was *entirely* Motorola intellectual property) were/are made that run at speeds up to about 300mhz. For example, the "Firebee" computer, a semi-compatible re-creation/evolution of the Atari ST series of computers, uses a Motorola/Freescale/NXP/whatever MCF5474 CPU at 266mhz.
So, there, 100%-Motorola CPUs faster than 100mhz exist. However, for all practical purposes every "G4" CPU sold by Apple, up the 1.67ghz model in the last Powerbooks are also "Motorola" CPUs. IBM didn't sell any 74xx-family CPUs under their brand name (regardless of whether any were churned out in IBM-owned fabs or not) and when they did finally sell a CPU with Altivec, the PPC970/G5, they reused the same core design that Motorola engineers had come up with for the G4 at the shared PowerPC A.I.M Alliance design center.
Seriously, I can't imagine any way to make this any clearer.
Last edited by a moderator:
I am interested in power macintosh g4 because according to you have a cpu motorola but I also like the starmax that I have seen that the screen is also of the brand but its cpu is also owned by motorola? how many mhz are you wearing this micro versions? greetings and thanks for listening to me
Similar threads
