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The 68060 was anything but half hearted. It was one of the first commodity superscalar processors and in the end had a long life in the embedded space. But, y
by kjs3 4y ago
The 68060 was anything but half hearted. It was one of the first commodity superscalar processors and in the end had a long life in the embedded space. But, yeah, the writing was on the wall that the 88k was the future, which to be fair is an excellent design, until it wasn't. Folks like Tektronix and DG who bet big on the 88k were not pleased.
- ajross 4y agoThe 060 was released[1] a full year after the Pentium and was significantly slower. It certainly wasn't a bad CPU, in an alternate universe where Motorola didn't fall as far behind on fab process as they did (or were able to find a second source to compete with Intel et. al.) you could absolutely see 68k continuing on as a dominant architecture. But in the real world of 1994, it was too little, too late, and is remembered now more as a bookend to an era than a processor design. [1] On paper. In fact it never really "reached market" until significantly later when a few folks started shipping it in embedded contexts. The only desktop/server/bigsystem users ended up being upgrades to existing '040 designs.