Motorola MC68030

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MC68030
Family: Motorola M68000 Family
Architecture: 32-bit
Manufacturer: Motorola
Year Introduced: 1987
Address bus: 32-bit
Data bus: 32-bit
Number of registers: 15 general 32-bit registers (8 data, 7 address)
Cache: 256 byte icache, 256 byte dcache
Clock Speed: 16, 20, 25, 33, 40, 50 MHz


The Motorola MC68030 is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola M68000 Family, the successor to the 68020. Later members include the 68040 and 68060.

The internal architecture was similar to the 68020; performance was increased in part by the increased use of caching; the MC68030 included an additional separate 256-byte cache for data. The MC68030 Data sheet (below) gives a detailed description of the organization of its caches, and pipe-lining.

It was the first family member to include memory management on the main chip. It did not include floating point; a separate floating point chip had to be used if hardware floating point was desired.

It was used in a number of Macintosh, Amiga and later Atari personal computers, and also workstations from NeXT.

The prototyping of this processor, occurring before modern silicon libraries were designed, was debugged in TTL logic (below).

Downgraded versions which omitted the memory management were produced for embedded systems.

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