4 Nov
2008
4 Nov
'08
3:13 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 4 Nov 2008 at 11:39, Brent Hilpert wrote:
No - I wasn't forgetting the F8. It was an interesting architecture in the way
the functional units were spread around the physical chips. Seemed very
tortured when I first saw it, until I understood how it could be useful for
economically efficient embedded systems. They were off to a good start in that
regard in the early 70s.
Interesting to speculate whether the architecture could have grown and been
carried into the future to contend in the marketplace occupied by PICs,etc.
today, but I'm not familiar enough with it in depth to say.
I haven't looked into it in depth but it has
been a point of interest to me as
to how Fairchild fell from grace in the 1980s: failing to produce a strong
contender in the microproc arena?, betting the farm on the wrong technology
(high-performance bipolar/I3L instead of CMOS?, too focussed on the high-end
military market?, too much brain drain to other companies? ...
I don't think that was exclusively the case. Anyone remember the
Fairchild F8? Around the same time as the 9440, the F8 was hugely
popular in embedded type applications. The "Channel F" game console
and the Video Brain used them.
But Fairchild took the product nowhere after that. A very puzzling
company, Fairchild.