[Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 145, Issue 52

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 16, 2016, at 11:49 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> On 2016-02-16 17:43, lists at openmailbox.org wrote:
>> On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:40:09 -0500
>> William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Actually, one of DEC's biggest mistakes was not OEMing the uVax chips...
>>> They would've killed the 68k had they had the uVaxII chipset
>>> available for early workstations.
>> 
>> I'm not so sure about that. The 68k was used in an awful lot of devices
>> from handhelds (Palm) to TI calculators and a whole lot more than
>> workstations. Could handheld devices in that day run microVax chips?
> 
> For a lot of embedded, low power stuff, it would have made more sense to use PDP-11s. But DEC had those chips as well, and was somewhat unwilling in that market too. Imagine if they had tries to really push for getting PDP-11s out there in all kind of devices, and made one or two more implementations to shrink and reduce power... That could have been nice.

One complication was that, until around the 3rd generation Ethernet chip, DEC's inhouse chip business made chips that cost much, much more than anyone else's.  There's a reason the networking products stuck to LANCE chips for quite some time.  I think it was the TGEC ("third generation Ethernet chip") that finally became cost-competitive (as well as being functionally superior to every alternative).

DEC got very seriously into low power with the StrongARM (SA110) chip, but that was much later.  It was quite amazing, though; I don't remember how much lower power per MHz than every other processor out there, but it was quite significant and set the stage for the lower power processor technology that enabled smartphones.

	paul