Lending the lie to the perception that there was not much value left in Motorola Inc’s 68000 microprocessor architecture, the company has licensed the simpler parts in core form to Hewlett-Packard Co for use in peripheral controllers. Hewlett has signed a non-exclusive license agreement for the 68000, 68020, 68030 and ColdFire variable-length RISC microprocessor cores. The licensing agreement provides a second source of supply for essential microprocessors in many of Hewlett-Packard’s products, and the company is permitted to fabricate or modify products as needed to meet internal design requirements, the companies said. The ColdFire instruction set is an optimized subset of the 68000 set, and Motorola says the hybrid part is intended to deliver the best compromise between complex and conventional fixed instruction length RISC CPUs, where an optimum balance between code density and transistor count can be achieved.
