The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 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.
The Motorola 68030 ("sixty-eight-oh-thirty") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 family. It was released in 1987. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is often referred to as the 030 (pronounced oh-three-oh or oh-thirty). The 68030 is essentially a 68020 with a memory management unit (MMU) and instruction and data caches of 256 bytes each.
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.
The Motorola 68040 ("sixty-eight-oh-forty") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the '040 (pronounced oh-four-oh or oh-forty). The 68040 was the first 680x0 family member with an on-chip Floating-Point Unit (FPU). It thus included all of the functionality that previously required external chips, namely the FPU and Memory Management Unit (MMU), which was added in the 68030.
The Pentium (also referred to as P5, its microarchitecture, or i586) is a fifth generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessor that was introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993, as the very first CPU in the Pentium brand. It was instruction set compatible with the 80486 but was a new and very different microarchitecture design from previous iterations. The P5 Pentium was the first superscalar x86 microarchitecture and the world's first superscalar microprocessor to be in mass productionmeaning it generally executes at least 2 instructions per clock mainly because of a design-first dual integer pipeline design previously thought impossible to implement on a CISC microarchitecture.
The Sinclair QL (for Quantum Leap) is a personal computer launched by Sinclair Research in 1984, as an upper-end counterpart to the ZX Spectrum. The QL was aimed at the serious home user and professional and executive users markets from small to medium-sized businesses and higher educational establishments, but failed to achieve commercial success. While the ZX Spectrum has an 8-bit Zilog Z80 as the CPU, the QL uses a Motorola 68008. The 68008 is a member of the Motorola 68000 family with 32-bit internal data registers, but an 8-bit external data bus.
The Motorola MC68010 processor is a 16/32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1982 as the successor to the Motorola 68000. It fixes several small flaws in the 68000, and adds a few features. The 68010 is pin-compatible with the 68000, but is not 100% software compatible. Some of the differences were: The MOVE from SR instruction is now privileged (it may only be executed in supervisor mode). This means that the 68010 meets Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements.
Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depends on the instruction mix; even for comparing processors in the same family the IPS measurement can be problematic. Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few branches and no cache contention, whereas realistic workloads typically lead to significantly lower IPS values.
The Amiga 4000, or A4000, from Commodore is the successor of the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 3000 computers. There are two models: the A4000/040 released in October 1992 with a Motorola 68040 CPU, and the A4000/030 released in April 1993 with a Motorola 68EC030. The Amiga 4000 system design was generally similar to that of the A3000, but introduced the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) chipset with enhanced graphics. The SCSI system from previous Amigas was replaced by the lower-cost Parallel ATA.
The Motorola 68020 ("sixty-eight-oh-twenty", "sixty-eight-oh-two-oh" or "six-eight-oh-two-oh") is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. A lower-cost version was also made available, known as the 68EC020. In keeping with naming practices common to Motorola designs, the 68020 is usually referred to as the "020", pronounced "oh-two-oh" or "oh-twenty". The 020 was in the market for a relatively short time. The Motorola 68030 was announced in September 1986 and began deliveries in the summer of 1987.
