At the risk of upsetting the masses theres another topic I think you should read into VERY carefully.
Q. Does Motorola seriously have a future in the desktop processor market?
The answer is quite clearly NO. This is truly a volume market like never before... and Apple as its only customer at present isn't a big enough player to justify Motorola to spend the sort of money it needs to to keep up with the PC world.
I think we need to be concerned about the long term future of PPC. The last thing we need is another dead end architecture. I'm not suggesting that we necessarily need the power of the everfaster Athlons or P4's but the fact is that they are now a generation ahead of PPC. PPC might go microwave in 5 years time if its lucky. Some guy in Japan recently clocked his P4 at 1.8 GHz. We are talking about a 180MHz coldfire now! Is this how far motorola has brought the 68k series after 20 years of development? I'm sorry to admit it here but I'm not the fan of Motorola it appears many are. Dropping of the 68k series was just a big a factor in killing platforms like atari and amiga as their respective company managements were. don't forget Apple nearly went under around that time too.
What if (!) these companies designing Atari hardware did it around a $50 Duron or an embedded StrongArm running at 500MHz. Surely these are a really cheap way to go and would give crazy horsepower to TOS.
What about using the new all in one SIS SocketA chipset with the duron and pack it in an ST style case. Port a native magic or mint or TOS and voila. Power without the price. I think if this were 1985 again thats what Jack Tramiel would have demanded. Don't go boutique..Use what you can thats cheap, standard and good... and write the tightest and simplest to use OS you can on it.
