Motorola 68060 surfaces in Heurikon board

Electronic News, April 4, 1994 by Walter Andrews

AUSTIN, TEXAS--Motorola, Inc. is expected soon to begin volume production of the long-waited, latest version of its 68000 series even while it works on an embedded MPU version of its new PowerPC called the 300 series.

The new 68060 embedded microprocessor which will be formally introduced at the Embedded Systems Conference April 18 (EN, March 28), has gone through alpha samplinfg to a limited number of customers and has been beta sampling to a largernumber for the last month, the sources said.

Volume production of an initial 50 MHz, 100 Mips version of the 3.3V 68060, which will replace and be compatible with the current 25 MHz, 5V 68040, is expected to begin by July, they said. Technical details of the 68060, which is a 32-bit processor with a superscalar, pipelined architecture have been known for some time (EN Oct. 5, 1992).

Heurikon Corp. of Madison, Wisc, last week said it will show at the Embedded Systems Conference its Nitro60, the company's first VMEbus CPU board based on the 68060. A Heurikon spokesman said the Nitro60 board targets graphics-originated applications like printing, image processing and simulation that require high-speed I/O and data transfers. It provides either 8 or 16MB of 70-ns DRAM, he said. With 8MB of DRAM, the Nitro60 costs $5,495, the spokesman said.

Volume production of a 60 MHz part, and other faster versions of the 68060 MPU will follow, the sources said. They said Motorola also is working on an embedded microprocessor version of the joint Apple-IBM-Motorola PowerPC referred to as the 300 series, which would complement the 68060 in the higher performance area. No comment could be obtained from Motorola.

It has been reported that IBM is working on an embedded PowerPC device for the separate microcontroller market (EN, Aug. 9, 1993), called the 2400 PowerPC family. Motorola also confirmed earlier that Ford Motor Co. was working to replace an 88K design with a cell-based PowerPC for engine control applications (EN, May 24, 1993).

Motorola dominates the market for high-performance, embedded microprocessors with a 55 percent share of the $600 million 1993 market while having only 10.4 percent of the $484 million microcontroller market, said Tony Massimini, an embedded market analyst with In-Stat Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. He said 49.6 million embedded microprocessors of 16-bits or higher were sold in 1993.

Motorola had 47 percent of the smaller embedded microprocessor market in 1992 when 43 million units were sold, Mr. Massimini said. Motorola is expected to keep more than half the market in 1994, which Mr. Massimini is forecasting to grow to 61.7 million units.

About 90 percent of the 68000 microprocessors are sold to the embedded market with the bulk of the remainder being used in personal computers made by Apple, the analyst said. He estimated that Motorola had 68000 MPU sales of about $400 million "to the PC world" in 1993 out of total PC microprocessor market of $7.5 billion.

The 68000 PC dollar market was larger than that for the embedded market, he said, because the average selling price (ASP) of devices sold for use in PCs was much higher than those sold for embedded use. Embedded microprocessors, however, make up close to 90 percent by volume of the 68000 MPUs sold, Mr. Massimini said.

As Apple shifts its PCs to the PowerPC, the number of 68000's used in PCs will decline although the dollar market may rise by a few percentage points in 1993 as the ASP rises with the introduction of the higher-priced 68060, the In-Stat analyst said.

Erik Jansen, a semiconductor financial analyst with Alex Brown & Son, thought Motorola is running the risk of creating confusion in the embedded marketplace by perpetuating the 68000 while at the same time planning an embedded version of PowerPC.

"The first thing I would be looking for is how this product related to, or unrelated to, the PowerPC architecture and strategy. To that extent, is Motorola going to repackage that architecture and put a different name on it or repackage a derivative of that PowerPC architecture putting a different name on it, or are they going to make the blunder of dividing what could be a unified market for them," Mr. Jansen told Electronic News.

"Motorola doesn't need to do it (develop more 68000s). Every guy out there that's using the 68040, or some high-end derivative version of the 68000 product line, right now has got to be looking at PowerPC to see how he can use or permute that product," he said.

The analyst said Motorola may be repeating the "tragedy of the past" when it tried to introduce several years ago an 88000 architecture and sell it next to a 68000 architecture.