Mac Mania 2/MacMania 2.toast/Demo's/Tools&Utilities/PowerPC/PPC News 3011

Text File | 1994-05-03 | 8.9 KB | 166 lines | [TEXT/ERIC]

STANDBY FOR THE 32-BIT, WASHING MACHINE WITH SPEECH INPUT?

The embedded processor market is not, let's face it, a particular
sexy one. Compared to the processors which power the latest high-
performance PC, those lurking in your TV, automobile or washing
machine are low profile things which do not lend themselves to
mandlebrot-rendering demonstrations. However in terms of sheer
volumes shipped, the market for embedded processors dwarfs that of
so-called mainstream processors. Even if it faded from the desktop,
there are those who argue that PowerPC could be counted a success if
it managed to capture a significant slice of this very large pie.

Moreover the market is changing rapidly. Today embedded shipments are
dominated by lowly, four-bit devices with precious little processing
power, however most research figures show that it is the 16bit and
32bit area that is growing fastest, and this is the wave which
Motorola and IBM hope to catch.

Put simply, an embedded microprocessor, is skewed towards a
specialism, whereas a general purpose microprocessor has to be, well,
general purpose. The embedded processor have to be very easily and
cheaply manufactured, but they don't generally have to be
particularly  powerful. They may, however have to integrate all kinds
of weird-and wonderful support circuitry onto the chip itself in
order to keep the price of the aforementioned car/tv/washing machine,
acceptably low.

Motorola conservatively estimates that the typical home has 25-40
microcontrollers, the normal automobile 5-20 and your office between
one and five.

So the average embedded processor consists of a simplified CPU core
with some in-built RAM, and maybe ROM, perhaps a specialised circuit
or two and the ability to interface to a variety of external
peripherals. "Old CPUs do not die", the saying goes "they get
embedded".  What IBM and Motorola have done, with their new embedded
offerings, is take the PowerPC core,  strip it to the bare essentials
and then add lots of nice I/O support.

Though the new products are weedy by other PowerPC standards they
kick sand in the face of most other embedded controllers. For a start
they are 32bit devices;  and  the number of 32bit devices out there
today is minuscule. Indeed the sector is still dominated by 4bit
processors, though there are a fair number of 16bit parts about.  The
applications that the companies are targeting - set-top boxes and the
like extend the reach of the traditional embedded processor into the
realm of the straight microprocessor. The distinction between a
standard CPU and an embedded controller is becoming increasingly
blurred.

To give some idea of market size, Dataquest says 28 million 16bit and
32bit micro-controllers will be sold in Europe alone this year and
the 4bit market is roughly 10 times that size. By comparison, around
15 million conventional 32bit microprocessors will ship. Dataquest
doesn't even bother to separate 16bit and 32bit microprocessors
sales, since the 32bit segment is so small.

As we've said, though, the embedded CPUs are cheap - in total those
28 million chips are expected to fetch only $117m, where the 15
million CPUs will bring in $2.3 billion! Though both markets are
growing year-on-year at around 35% percent, overall, the high-end
embedded controller market is storming along at 45% growth, as the
software that controllers are expected to run becomes more
sophisticated.

IBM and Motorola's positions in the embedded market couldn't be more
different. IBM is the new kid on the block. True, it has been making
embedded processors and microcontrollers for many years, but they
have all been for internal consumption. Its token ring cards; its
communications controllers are stuffed with the things, but IBM did
not turn to the merchant market until around 18 months ago, with the
formation of IBM Microelectronics. Not known for its high profile,
the launch of the PPC 403GA controller marks perhaps its most
aggressive push into the market to date.

Motorola, by contrast, is an old hand at the game. Historically,
strength lies in the automotive market, but you'll find Motorola
chips lurking in anything from mobile phones, through to the
telephone exchange. It is active in the 8, 16 and 32-bit markets, but
ignores the massive,though low-margin, 4-bit controller market. The
size of the business is indicated by the fact that Motorola can sell
you any one of 250 different 8-bit controllers. Just one plant; its
MOS 1 factory in East Kilbride, Scotland, apparently churns out
millions of the things a year.  Though it will not say how many units
it makes in total each year, or reveal what kind of revenues it
makes, its own literature quotes Dataquest's estimate that Motorola
has 19% of the total embedded market and In-Stat Inc's estimate that
a total of 2.1bn microcontrollers were shipped last year, bringing in
revenues of $5.8bn.

Compared to all the other PowerPC launches the RMCU 505 emerged with
a surprisingly muted fanfare. Where was the 'RISC is best' message?
Where was the 'PowerPC is the way, the truth, the light'?. The
difference in tone can be attributed to the fact that, whereas
PowerPC is Motorola's only egg in the desktop-PC basket, in the
embedded market PowerPC is just one of a huge Motorola clutch. One
Motorola insider, who actually works on the RISC product line was
actually heard to utter the immortal phrase "there has been a lot of
RISC hype and people have been told to use RISC even if they don't
want to" at the RMCU 505 launch. Your correspondent nearly choked on
his quail's eggs.

The situation was highlighted by the nearly simultaneous
announcement of the Motorola 68060 processor family, the last member
of the dynasty which, until now, has powered Apple's Macintoshes. The
060 is almost entirely aimed at the embedded market and it can pack a
bigger processing punch than the initial RMCU 505.

Motorola, then is preparing to face the future with a dual-strand
policy; the 68060 for developers want to carry on using their
existing tools and the RMCU 505 for those wanting to take the plunge
into RISC. The company admits that the part will be used by a good
number of developers to test the water, but also believes that quite
a few RMCU 505's will find there way into production equipment. The
company says that it is working with Kaleida Labs Inc. in Mountain
View and Scientific Atlanta Inc, Norcross, Georgia, to develop the
next generation of digital home-communication terminals.

Ask how Motorola intends to position the 68060 and the RMCU 505 and
the company is quite sanguine "we don't force the customer in either
direction" says UK RISC product marketing engineer, Ian Fergusson. He
even admits that RISC has its problems in the embedded environment -
namely code expansion. If there is one thing that customers of
embedded applications want, it is small, compact applications. Who is
going to buy a video recorder with 2Megs of RAM? In this area RISC is
at a disadvantage - code size expands as instruction sets decrease.

Ask IBM about its strategy and you won't get a very cogent answer,
other than a list of potential markets. The story is still being
formulated, it seems.

But as we have said already, the market is changing and both Motorola
and IBM are betting that a whole new type of application, which can
broadly be categorised as the interactive-multi-media-super-video-
on-demand-highway-games-console-sort-of-thing will drive demand for
32bit embedded processors, particular processors with excellent
floating point performance like the PowerPC. In this market, RAM-cram
is less important than processing power.

Not surprisingly, those in the Intel camp are also turning their
attention to the high-end embedded controller market, but at the
moment, they appear to be concentrating on the more main-stream
office and industrial equipment market. Last October Intel Corp
unveiled the embedded Intel386 EX processor and picked up the weighty
support of Microsoft at Work - the Redmond company's strategy for
adding intelligence to everything from fax machines to photocopiers
and printers. Last week it announced that the EX has begun sampling.
Areas which Intel identifies as key include PABX line cards, hand-
held point of sale terminals, and a host of others ranging from
network cards and avionics to cellular phones and medical systems. As
Intel's desktop focus moves to Pentium, the 386 and eventually the
486, will be repackaged as embedded cores.

However it is not certain that Intel's dominance on the desktop will
translate to the embedded market, particularly as there is,
apparently a certain grandeur associated in having a RISC chip in
your box. Intel, of course, has the i960 embedded processor, which it
claims is the single best selling RISC processor in the world. The
company is about to launch the 32bit i960CA version (previously
codenamed Cobra). This chip, Intel insists, is more than capable of
giving PowerPC a run for its money. Still, if the market projections
are right, there will be more than enough room for everyone to play.

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