Motorola Ships Long-Delayed Computer Chip : Technology: The advanced 68040 microprocessor will be the brains of a powerful new generation of computers.
Motorola announced Monday that it had finally begun volume shipments of its 68040 microprocessor, a computer-on-a-chip that will form the brain inside new computers from Hewlett-Packard, Next Inc. and many other companies.
The new chip, one of the most sophisticated ever made, has been delayed for several months, angering customers and handicapping Motorola’s efforts to keep up with Intel Corp. and other competitors in the microprocessor race. Motorola expects to sell as many as 500,000 of the 68040 chips next year, and it will take until next summer for the company to catch up with the current order backlog.
The 68040 is the latest member of Motorola’s 68000 family of microprocessors, a highly successful product line that has established Motorola as the world’s No. 2 microprocessor vendor behind Intel. But while key customers such as Apple and Hewlett-Packard have remained loyal to the 68000 series, other computer vendors have abandoned it in favor of Intel products and the so-called reduced instruction-set computing (RISC) processors designed by Sun Microsystems and MIPS Computer Systems.
Analysts said the 68040 appeared to offer excellent computing performance, but that Motorola was unlikely to win back customers who had already switched to other products. By the same token, it appears that the delays have not cost Motorola any customers, because decisions about what kind of microprocessor to use in a computer are made far in advance and cannot be easily altered at the last minute.
“There were several delays, and that hurt a little bit, but the primary users will be happy to finally get it,” said Dean McCarron, an analyst with the chip research firm In-stat in Phoenix. “The 68000 architecture has its own following. Anyone who wanted to make a move would already have made it.”
Hewlett-Packard had hoped to begin shipping a new line of workstations using the 68040 several months ago, but a spokesman said the delay had not been damaging. H-P shipped the machines with the older 68030 microprocessor, and will now remove those parts and replace them with 68040s.
Next Inc., the company headed by Apple Computer co-founder Steven P. Jobs, said deliveries of its 68040-based machines were on schedule. “We’re getting the amount (of 68040s) that we forecast for the fourth quarter,” said Next sales vice president Todd Rulon-Miller. He said Next would ship “thousands” of its new machines, which were introduced last December, by the end of the year.
But Rulon-Miller added that demand was stronger than expected, and Next will be rationing deliveries of its products until early next year.
Motorola said it has more than 30 customers for the 68040, including Apple, Unisys and NCR, as well as H-P and Next. Apple has not yet announced products using the 68040, but it is expected to use it for more powerful versions of the Macintosh computer.
The 68040 packs 1.2 million transistors into a one-half-inch square slice of silicon and will sell for $595 in quantities of 1,000, and for $495 in quantities of 10,000. Motorola is currently producing several hundred of the chips a week, and will be making 1,000 a week by January.
Motorola said the chip is more powerful than Intel’s top-of-the-line 80486 microprocessor or Sun Microsystem’s Sparc chip. Still, some companies such as NCR have made long-term plans to shift from the 68000 family to Intel’s X86 family. Motorola once had a near-monopoly on the engineering workstation market--and counted Sun among its customers. Now, many workstation vendors have shifted to Sparc and other RISC processors.
