Motorola 68000 series

They were best known as the processors used in the early Apple Macintosh, the Sharp X68000, the Commodore Amiga, the Sinclair QL, the Atari ST and Falcon, the Atari Jaguar, the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) and Sega CD, the Philips CD-i, the Capcom System I (Arcade), the AT&T UNIX PC, the Tandy Model 16/16B/6000, the Sun Microsystems Sun-1, Sun-2 and Sun-3, the NeXT Computer, NeXTcube, NeXTstation, and NeXTcube Turbo, early Silicon Graphics IRIS workstations, the Aesthedes, computers from MASSCOMP, the Texas Instruments TI-89/TI-92 calculators, the Palm Pilot (all models running Palm OS 4.x or earlier), the Control Data Corporation CDCNET Device Interface, the VTech Precomputer Unlimited and the Space Shuttle.

68010: 68020: 68030: 68040: 68060: The 680x0 line of processors has been used in a variety of systems, from 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.

The 680x0 CPU family became most well known for powering desktop computers and video game consoles such as the Macintosh 128K, Amiga, Sinclair QL, Atari ST, Genesis / Mega Drive, NG AES/Neo Geo CD, CDTV.

The early 68000-based Adobe PostScript interpreters and their hardware were named for Cold War-era U.S. rockets and missiles: Atlas, Redstone, etc.

Many proprietary video editing systems used 68000 processors, such as the MacroSystem Casablanca, which was a black box with an easy to use graphic interface (1997).

The groundbreaking Quantel Paintbox series of early based 24-bit paint and effects system was originally released in 1981 and during its lifetime it used nearly the entire range of 68000 family processors, with the sole exception of the 68060, which was never implemented in its design.

Another contender in the video arena, the Abekas 8150 DVE system, used the 680EC30, and the Play Trinity, later renamed Globecaster, uses several 68030s.

That is, it was typically possible to combine operations freely with operands, rather than being restricted to using certain addressing modes with certain instructions.

The lower 8 bits is the user byte, also known as the condition code register (CCR), and modification of it is not privileged.

This permits the extra bit from arithmetic, logic, and shift operations to be separated from the carry for flow-of-control and linkage.

The 68050 was reportedly "a minor upgrade of the 68040" that lost a battle for resources within Motorola, competing against projects that had been scheduled to succeed it: the 0.5μm, low-power, low-cost "LP040", and the superscalar, superpipelined "Q", borrowing from the 88110 and anticipated as the 68060.

[20] Odd-numbered releases had always been reactions to issues raised within the prior even numbered part; hence, it was generally expected that the 68050 would have reduced the 68040's power consumption (and thus heat dissipation), improved exception handling in the FPU, used a smaller feature size and optimized the microcode in line with program use of instructions.

There was a CPU with the 68070 designation, which was a licensed and somewhat slower version of the 16/32-bit 68000 with a basic DMA controller, I²C host and an on-chip serial port.

[27] Despite increasing competition from RISC products, Edgcore sought to distinguish its products in the market by emphasising its "alliance" with Motorola, employing a marketing campaign drawing from Aesop's fables with "the fox (Edgecore) who climbs on the back of the stallion (Motorola) to pluck fruit off the higher branches of the tree".

During the 1980s and early 1990s, when the 68000 was widely used in desktop computers, it mainly competed against Intel's x86 architecture used in IBM PC compatibles.

The fourth generation competed with the P5 Pentium line, but it was not nearly as widely used as its predecessors, since much of the old 68000 marketplace was either defunct or nearly so (as was the case with Atari and NeXT), or converting to newer architectures (PowerPC for the Macintosh and Amiga, SPARC for Sun, and MIPS for Silicon Graphics (SGI)).

Embedded versions of the 68000 often compete with processor architectures based on PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, SuperH, and others.