Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 6th Jan 2009 09:36 UTC, submitted by caffeine deprived
It seems that after Intel, just about every chip maker wants a piece of the netbook pie. AMD is an obvious competitor, but VIA is also eyeing the little notebooks. However, more exotic options like the Chinese Loongson chips and ARM's Cortex A-8 and A-9 chips are also among the contenders. We can now add a new contender: Freescale.
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Member since:
2009-01-06
Actually, nobody was able to produce PowerPC desktop chips for Apple, not even IBM.
The cost of developing a desktop chip outweighed the relatively small volumes that Apple was willing to purchase. (And Apple was practically their only desktop client.) For every desktop chip that it sold, FSL was selling 2-3 orders of magnitude more in embedded processors.
Why spend all that R&D effort on desktop that can't be leveraged for the embedded space? A 64-bit DMA core can only be used on a desktop machine but a great new timer core can be reused in several different embedded platforms.