ARM has just as crappy a story except from the opposite way but not the performance or PC. They had power consumption but didn't duplicate their early PC support in the US. Palm and Windows CE handhelds did ok but go clobbered by the iPhone. ARM never had a big launch with multiple PC OS vendors. ARM also didn't have motherboards available in PC configuration for a lot of its lifetime. That's what made the Raspberry Pi so special since it was an actual motherboard available to people and not some dev / eval board. Now, we see ARM showing up in the server and PC market because the performance is there, smart phones have paid for the research, and ARM is customizable / multi-vendor.
If we had been lucky, IBM would have chosen the 68000.
> Palm and Windows CE handhelds did ok but go clobbered by the iPhone.
Palm and Windows CE were there since 1998, maybe even before. the iPhone came out in 2007. There were multiple ARM PDAs at the time (Compaq's iPaq, HP's Jornada, Palm's Pilot, many windows CE devices).
> If we had been lucky, IBM would have chosen the 68000.
Totally agree. The 68000 ISA is so elegant compared to the mess that is x86.
The original Palms were Dragonball machines (68000) and CE actually ran pretty well on MIPS.
Palm and CE are 1996. Like I said, they did ok, but never sold in the volume that the iPhone and later Android achieved.
I dearly miss the 68000 and seriously sometimes wish the whole PowerPC thing didn't happen in favor of continued 68000. If the x86 proved anything its CISC / RISC wasn't exactly clear cut. The 88000 wasn't that bad except for a price that makes me think they were doing a bit of hallucinogens. I never got to play with ColdFire.
ARM has just as crappy a story except from the opposite way but not the performance or PC. They had power consumption but didn't duplicate their early PC support in the US. Palm and Windows CE handhelds did ok but go clobbered by the iPhone. ARM never had a big launch with multiple PC OS vendors. ARM also didn't have motherboards available in PC configuration for a lot of its lifetime. That's what made the Raspberry Pi so special since it was an actual motherboard available to people and not some dev / eval board. Now, we see ARM showing up in the server and PC market because the performance is there, smart phones have paid for the research, and ARM is customizable / multi-vendor.
If we had been lucky, IBM would have chosen the 68000.