alt Hacker NewsI still have some of the 88000 reference manuals, and it was really my first introduction to RISC architecture, and I thought it was great. But I never figured out why companies like Apple never chose it for their CPU?
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Timing. The 68k still had legs, i.e. the 68040 provided great drop in performance and had an enormous ecosystem and economies of scale. By the time the RISC wars were starting to get fever pitched, the POWER architecture and AIM alliance seemed like a blessing to combine ecosystems and economies of scale for the A and M constituents. And it was.. successful product lines for 2-3 decades from all sorts of embedded systems to G5 workstations to spacecraft.
The 88000 was implemented across three large ICs. This took an enormous amount of board space and would be unfeasible on the smaller Macs.
They did basically. What happened is that Apple own CPU project crashed and burned. Then they had some meetings with people including DEC for Alpha and IBM. IBM offered POWER and IBM was also willing to go in on some other projects, like the next gen OS Teligent.
But Apple didn't want to drop Motorola fully. So Motorola, Apple and IBM figured out that with some tweaks to the 88000 the could turn it into something POWER like. And that thing was PowerPC that Motorola supplied to Apple. That's my understanding.
Complicated, expensive CPU marketed to very high end workstation use? Nobody thought it was worth picking up even if it was faster than the alternatives.
Both Apple and NeXT had machines prototyped around it, but it was initially very expensive I believe, and I think Apple was easily convinced to go with PowerPC ... and rather than evolve it and push it further Motorola dropped it in favour of going in on PowerPC.
The sad thing is Intel showed there was still life left in CISC, and Motorola themselves ended up circling back on 68k in the form of ColdFire which proved you could do for 68k what Intel did w/ the Pentium. But by then all their 68k customers had moved on from the 68k ISA.
I believe it was the first RISC that Apple prototyped building a Mac around, including a 68K emulator. IIRC from Gary Davidian’s CHM oral history, it was corporate dealmaking that led to AIM and PPC more than any technical negatives for the 88K.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-cent...