WI: 68K and PPC Survive And Thrive

As we all know the battle of the processors was won by the Intel x86 series on the CISC side and various flavours of ARMs on the RISC side. Motorola's 68K chip was pretty much doomed to obscurity once Apple dropped it in favour of PPCs (which they later dropped in favour of x86s) and Atari and Commodore went out of business. Likewise Apple's decision to drop the PPC has lead to its demise as a serious contender in the market now dominated by ARM.

So. What would it take for both to be still competitive with Intel and ARM's offerings? Or even dominant.
 
As we all know the battle of the processors was won by the Intel x86 series on the CISC side and various flavours of ARMs on the RISC side. Motorola's 68K chip was pretty much doomed to obscurity once Apple dropped it in favour of PPCs (which they later dropped in favour of x86s) and Atari and Commodore went out of business. Likewise Apple's decision to drop the PPC has lead to its demise as a serious contender in the market now dominated by ARM.

So. What would it take for both to be still competitive with Intel and ARM's offerings? Or even dominant.
The 68000 series was MUCH better than Intel's x86 set. It had full 32 bit capabilities much earlier, and a much more logical orthogonal instruction set.

Intel's kludge offset addressing of memory (nothing could be accessed in larger than 64K chunks) was crazy.

I mentioned to a friend once, decades ago, that IBM was brain-dead to go with the 8086. He looked at me oddly and replied that IBM went with the 8086 because the 8087 was a standard, integrated (not integrated on one chip, but integrated in instruction sets, etc, IIRC) numeric coprocessor, and some of their early customers NEEDED math.


So. PoD Motorola decides to make a standard numeric coprocessor to go with the 68000 as a paired set, and IBM goes with Motorola for the IBM PC (and all their clones).

Then, there's no awkward 640K memory limit, we can evolve *DOS to be a real operating system, etc. We might even be able to avoid Microsoft, if we're lucky.

Sound good?
 
Another thought would be to have Commodore's Amiga survive and switch to PowerPC along with Apple (rather than switching to PA-RISC as was planned), this gives two companies demanding PowerPC chips for home computer usage... the big issue as I understand it was that Apple's market wasn't large enough for IBM or Motorola/Freescale to want to invest in moving PowerPC towards Apple's needs... maybe if there were multiple demands that could make it possible.

Another thought, with a later POD, is that IBM doesn't score processor deals with all major console makers... I've seen it claimed that because the consoles sell in greater volumes and didn't need to be portable, it caused IBM to direct resources away from Apple's PowerPC G5.
 
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