Motorola 88000
Due to the late start and extensive delays releasing the second-generation MC88110, the m88k achieved very limited success outside of the MVME platform and embedded controller environments.
At the time, Intel held about 80% of the overall computer market, while Motorola controlled 90% of the rest.
At first, there was an intense debate within the industry whether the concept would actually improve performance, or if its longer machine language programs would actually slow the execution through additional memory accesses.
Apple remained the company's only large vendor outside the workstation space; other users of the 68000, notably Atari Corporation and Commodore International, were floundering in a market that was rapidly standardizing on IBM PC compatibles.
[1] RISC designs were a conscious effort to tailor the processor to the types of operations being called by the compilers on that platform, in the case of Unix workstations, the C programming language.
Removing these unused instructions from the CPU eliminated this overhead and freed up significant room on the chip.
This gave room to increase the number of processor registers, which had a far greater impact on performance than the removed special-case instructions.
[3] As existing RISC designs had entered the market already, the company decided that it would not attempt to compete with these and would instead produce the world's most powerful processor.
[5] In addition to the internal commands supported out of the box, it set aside blocks of 256 instructions that could be used by co-processors.
Systems could include more than one MC88200, producing larger caches and allowing multiple paths to main memory for improved performance.
It worked a few features of the 88000 (such as a compatible bus interface[11]) into the new PowerPC architecture to offer its customer base some sort of upgrade path.
The idea behind this splitting of duties was to allow multiprocessor systems to be built more easily; a single MC88200 could support up to four MC88100s.
However, this also meant that building the most basic system, with a single processor, required both chips and considerable wiring between them, driving up costs.
The MC88100 implemented a 'Master/Checker' capability for fault tolerance employing two or more redundant MC88100s: In this application, two processors are wired together.
An additional modification, made at the behest of MIT's *T project, resulted in the MC88110MP, including on-chip communications for use in multi-processor systems.
Ford Motor Company had planned to use the chips, which alongside adoption by telecommunications vendors had been viewed as guaranteeing the viability of the architecture indefinitely.
Unlike tower or rack mount systems, the Series 900 sat on top of each other and connected to one another with bus-like cabling.
Linotype-Hell used the 88110 in its "Power" workstations running the DaVinci raster graphics editor for image manipulation.
The 4-processor OMRON LUNA-88K machines from Japan used the m88k, and were used for a short time on the Mach kernel project at Carnegie Mellon University.
In the early 1990s Northern Telecom used the MC88100 and MC88110 as the central processor in its DMS SuperNode family of telephone switches.
Alpha Microsystems originally planned to migrate to the 88K architecture from the Motorola 68000, and internally created a machine around it running UNIX System V, but it was later scrapped in favour of later 68K derivatives.
