The unanticipated gallop of the commodity processor market to Reduced Instruction Set Computing architectures suddenly means that the burning issues of second source licences to the Motorola 68000 and Intel iAPX-86 families are, pace Advanced Micro Devices Inc, no longer exercising second source licence holders the way they were a couple of years ago. Philips NV’s Signetics chip shop was one of the four second sources for the 68000 family cut off without a penny by Motorola when the 68020 came out, but that worries Signetics no longer: it now wants to leap aboard the RISC bandwaggon, and according to Electronic News, is weighing up Motorola’s 88000, the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R2000A and R3000, Sun Microsystems’ Sparc, Advanced Micro Devices’ Am29000 and the forthcoming RISC-oriented NS32732. Its choice could come as a surprise, because its primary interest is processors for embedded applications and not straight CPUs.
