hmm.. Motorola's entire Semiconductor division is in a precarious position. Recent reports have it that it has been losing money for a while and the big wigs at the top have publicly stated that no division is sacred. A division in a similar position was fobbed off a year ago soon after it returned to profitability and SPS may be next. There's an article on the register here..
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/22880.html
Motorola's interest in all things CPU has been hazy for a long time. Of course they had problems sinking the type of money that AMD and Intel have done in the last few years into their Fab plants... and the reason is simply that Apple doesn't have a big enough market share to sell CPU's... so they slowed their updates and positioned the chips for the bigger embedded market.. simple economics. But its still not enough.
I am concerned when I see groups positioning themselves to rewrite their OS's purely in PPC.. for similar reason's I'm concerned for the likes of Tempest and Amiga as well. I think its great but the road to PPC has almost been a religious affair for some. Its just there may be a shake out going to occur in the embedded CPU market sooner or later.. especially if motorola exits.. and people will be screaming bloody murder. And PPC for the desktop looks even grayer. The big hope for this entire market would appear to be IBM.. however they too have proved reluctant to enter this market. Motorola has many embedded lines.. maybe too many.. and if its sold or streamlined.. some of them may go... 68k/Coldfire/MCore/HC08/HC11/PPC? surely there is overlap in the PPC/MCore/Coldfire target markets?
Both MIPS and ARM would appear better choices to me as they have large numbers of licensees.. even SPARC and SuperSH have multiple sources these days.
OR.. what about writing the next TOS entirely in Java?
