Talk:NS320xx
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The Professor link mentioned at the bottom of the article seems highly suspect to me.
The wiki article mentions what I have heard in other contexts as well, that the NS32032 was simply unreliable, and generally detested for that reason. I do know that Atari DID consider using them for what would become the ST series, but gave up on that idea when NatSemi made it clear that they were not able to supply the numbers (low yields? related to unreliability?) nor were they willing to lower the price (another pointer to low yields).
The Sun article, on the other hand, claims the problem all along was that they aimed at the low-price-point instead of the high-performance-point. I find this difficult to believe given the Atari history, and the article's explaination of the lower prices later in its history seems rather plausible.
Of course the author goes on to claim that the Java Chip is a sure-fire winner. We all know how that turned out!
Maury 20:07, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
- (I'm probably not replying to this correctly...I'm rather new to Wikipedia)
- The NS32032/NS32016/NS32008 had serious issues, all well documented. As far as the Sun article, I added it only as on-topic from someone there (it is, and he was), one perspective of a complex issue (which is all it is), and interesting (I thought it was). I don't out of hand dismiss what he has to say about the market (indeed, since I was there as well, I don't myself disagree), and I further don't dismiss him about Java. A lot of really, really smart people got caught up in that one.
[edit] HP FOCUS
It turns out that HP's FOCUS CPU was a fully 32-bit single-chip processor, and was released in 1982, before the release of the 32032 in 1984. If you consider a 32-bit CPU to be one with an external 32-bit data bus (which seems to be the commonly accepted definition), then HP FOCUS seems to have got there first. I tried, but I couldn't see how to work this into the article. --StuartBrady (Talk) 11:33, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
The FOCUS was predated by the BELLMAC-32A from AT&T Bell Labs (and post-divestiture, from Western Electric). The first BELLMAC-32A engineering samples were produced in 1980. --Brouhaha 21:11, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Broken Link
I have removed the following text from the article, because the link is broken:
- http://www.sun.com/microelectronics/picoJava/pioneers/vol2/professor.html has an interesting perspective on why the later 32000 series processors failed from an insider.
Before reposting this link, or a variant, we should ensure that the address is correct. --User:Wknight8111 (WB:Whiteknight) 04:14, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
