4 ms·
The Motorola 68k was just as much of a dead end in practice... and it took the Amiga and Atari ST platforms down with it, plus possibly others (it was used in a
by zozbot123 8y ago
The Motorola 68k was just as much of a dead end in practice... and it took the Amiga and Atari ST platforms down with it, plus possibly others (it was used in a LOT of places). It's only very recently that the Apollo core has been reviving it.
- wk_end 8y agoHorrendous mismanagement at both Commodore and Atari respectively took the Amiga and ST down; the writing was on the wall for those platforms long before the 68k architecture was ever starting to plateau. Even Apple's transition to PPC arguably had more to do with everyone (Motorola included) hopping on the RISC hype train than with some kind of fundamental performance limitations inherent to the 68k architecture.
- jandrese 8y agoThe 68k was also used in Sun Workstations at the time. Motorola's failure to improve on it left a lot of companies in the lurch, some of which never recovered. Certainly it started out in no worse a place than the 8086, and Intel was able to improve on that for many years. It seemed like after the 68040 Motorola just kind of gave up on developing chips, and then Intel launched the Pentium and ate their lunch.
- wmf 8y agoAfter the 68040 Motorola was working on PowerPC because they thought it was impossible to improve performance and maintain 68K compatibility.