Motorola Inc’s own Computer Systems division has finally admitted that the future of its parent company’s 88000 Series RISC chip is limited – and says it is working on a new generation of systems using the joint PowerPC RISC. The move has been widely expected from the moment the PowerPC alliance was announced two years ago and Apple Computer Inc finally abandoned its 88000 plans. When the Ford Motor company also decided to use the PowerPC in place of the 88000 for its next generation engine controllers, all hopes of selling sufficient volume to support further development disappeared. Motorola is for some time thought to have been putting pressure on its remaining customers to migrate to the PowerPC – the most significant of these being Data General Corp – and the fact that it has now let its own systems division come clean puts the pressure on the General to clarify its own position. Motorola Computer Systems has 601-based systems running now in its labs, but is more interested in the forthcoming 604 and 620 iterations. It says it won’t move to the PowerPC until performance is comparable with the 88110, which still has some clock speed windings to come. The transition, according to Computer Group vice-president Karl Stoltze, will be eased by the similarities between the two architectures: the PowerPC has been called an 88000 with an IBM instruction set. We are working on an operating system and software environment that will allow for a very easy transitional migration between the two, he said. Motorola plans to provide board-level PowerPC products designed as conversion systems in the very near future, and its first machines could be out around this time next year. The move makes the future of standards group 88open, already scaled back, look even more bleak. They did a great job, but now its basically done, said Motorola vice-president Wayne Sennett.
