Motorola 68000 series
| Designer | Motorola |
|---|---|
| Bits | 32-bit |
| Introduced | 1979 |
| Design | CISC |
| Branching | Condition code |
| Endianness | Big |
| Registers | |
| General purpose | 8 × 32-bit data registers + 7 32-bit address registers also usable for most operations + stack pointer |
| Floating point | 8 × 80-bit if FP present |
The Motorola 68000 series (also termed 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and were the primary competitors of Intel's x86 microprocessors. They were most well known as the processors powering the early Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, the Sinclair QL, the Atari ST, the WeatherStar, the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), and several others. Although no modern desktop computers are based on processors in the 68000 series, derivative processors are still widely used in embedded systems.
Motorola ceased development of the 68000 series architecture in 1994, replacing it with the development of the PowerPC architecture, which they developed in conjunction with IBM and Apple Computer as part of the AIM alliance.
The 68000 line of processors has been used in a variety of systems, from modern high-end Texas Instruments calculators (the TI-89, TI-92, and Voyage 200 lines) to all of the members of the Palm Pilot series that run Palm OS 1.x to 4.x (OS 5.x is ARM-based), and even radiation hardened versions in the critical control systems of the Space Shuttle. However, they became most well known as the processors powering desktop computers such as the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, the Sinclair QL, the Atari ST, and several others. The 68000 was also the processor of choice in the 1980s for Unix workstations and servers from firms such as Sun Microsystems, NeXT and Silicon Graphics (SGI). There was a 68000 version of CP/M called CP/M-68K, which was initially proposed to be the Atari ST operating system, but Atari chose Atari TOS instead.
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