With most of its bigger design wins having come from companies that have fallen on hard times and are looking to RISC and Unix to return them to prosperity, Motorola Inc is having to pull all the stops out to broaden the base of companies designing in its 88000 RISC microprocessor. To make the family more attractive, it has launched a low-cost 16MHz version of the part and cut the price of the faster members of the family. Motorola rates the 16MHz version of the 88100 CPU at 13.6 MIPS and is offering it at $148 a time in 1,000-up quantities; the 20MHz version is cut 29% to $494, the 25MHz version falls 30% to $488 and the top-end 33MHz version falls 27% to $652, for 1,000-up in each case. The 88200 cache memory management unit costs $175; the other versi ons are cut by the same percentages as the CPUs to $437, $612 and $855 when you buy 1,000 or more (al though since most people will want two cache units for each CPU, shouldn’t the latter be priced for quant ities of 2,000-up?) Motor ola is having to make a ma jor effort in the RISC mar ket because several of the biggest 68020 and 68030 us ers – Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Co and Ap ollo Computer Inc to name three – have already opted for their own RISCs, and its most prominent Japanese user, Sony Corp, has opted to move to the MIPS Comput er Systems Inc RISC family.
