> wasn't the heyday of the Motorola 68k the 80s? It depends on the market. For PC/workstation class machines, the 80's into the early 90's were 68k's moment in

> wasn't the heyday of the Motorola 68k the 80s? It depends on the market. For PC/workstation class machines, the 80's into the early 90's were 68k's moment in the sun. But I distinctly remember doing new embedded development work on 68K in the late 90's and and Palm Pilot (1997) had a 68K core also. So even though they had to retreat from one market, they stayed active in the embedded space. (Of course, so did Intel... that same project with the 68K also ran on an 80188EB, 386SX, and an AMD Elan SC400). > by the time the 486/040 came about it was already starting to show that motorola was not able to match intel's mhz push. Intel had a few more minor growing pains too. The 486/25 and /33 chips were easily accepted into the market, but the /50 was not. There were problems at the time getting a 50MHz motherboard to work correctly and not cause too many problems with radio interference. So the 50MHz part wound up being limited to the high end of the market. The step beyond 33 for the 'mainstream' PC market was the DX2/66, which left the bus/motherboard at 33MHz and used the on-chip cache to run the CPU itself at 66. So faster CPU than a DX/50, but less bus bandwidth, which turned out to be a reasonable tradeoff. (Particularly given that I/O was often very slow, anyway, being forced through a 16-bit 8Mhz AT bus.) The Pentium, of course, brought the >=60Mhz motherboard back into the PC mainstream, and there was also a 486/DX4 part around the Pentium timeframe. Contrary to its name, the DX4 was a clock tripled CPU that would run 33/100 (with an option for a doubled 50/100 as well). Clock multipliers came to the Pentium with the second revision... the original P5/60 and /66 ran 1:1, but the subsequent P5/90 and /100 ran 1.5:1.