The latest edition of Microprocessor Report says that the cancelled Motorola Inc 68050, a minor upgrade of the 68040, fell prey to a resource battle with two next-generation implementations that were to follow the 68050: the LP040, a low-cost, low-power re-implementation of the 68040 in 0.5 micron technology due to sample in late 1993, and Q, a fully static modular, superscalar, superpipelined part that borrows from the 88110 and will probably come out as the 68060. The newsletter speculates that if Q turns out to be good, it could significantly delay the migration of Apple’s customers to the PowerPC since the early PowerPC chips won’t have spectacular performance.
