Tick, Tock, Tock

Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief — In the world of military embedded computing, Intel processors are now long past the days when they were the outsider looking in. Things were not always so. Until about 20 years ago, Intel processors couldn’t crack the competition held by Motorola 68000 line of CPUs and its massive installed base in military systems. Many of those 68k based systems upgraded to the PowerPC processor in order to avoid rewriting all the legacy embedded software. Another issue was that Intel processors were burdened with power dissipation levels much higher than the embedded-focused PowerPC/68000 lineage of process