Motorola 88000

The 88000 (m88k for short) is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS. 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. When Motorola joined the AIM alliance in 1991 to develop the PowerPC, further development of the 88000 ended. Motorola entered the 1980s in a position of strength; their recently-introduced Motorola 68000 easily outperformed any other microprocessor on the market, and its 32-bit architecture was naturally suited to the emerging Unix workstation market. Intel was not moving aggressively into the 32-bit space, and the companies that did, notably National Semiconductor, botched their releases and left Motorola in control of everything that was not Intel. At the time, Intel held about 80% of the overall computer market, while Motorola controlled 90% of the rest. Into this came the early 1980's introduction of the RISC concept. 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. All such debate was ended by the mid-1980s when the first RISC-based workstations emerged; the latest Sun-3/80 running on a 20 MHz Motorola 68030 delivered about 3 MIPS, whereas the first SPARC-based Sun-4/260 with a 16 MHz SPARC delivered 10 MIPS. Hewlett-Packard, DEC and other large vendors all began moving to RISC platforms. This shift in the market had the potential to lock Motorola out of one of its only strongholds, and among its most lucrative. 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.