Motorola 68000
More info
- Owner
- Motorola
- Released
- 1979
- Type
- 16/32-bit microprocessor
- Address space
- 16 MB (24-bit bus)
The processor behind the Macintosh, the Amiga and the Atari ST — and the one whose flat address space made programmers loathe Intel's segments.
The 68000 arrived in 1979 with thirty-two bit registers but a sixteen-bit data bus, which is where the 16/32 label comes from. The decisive difference from contemporary x86 was addressing: the whole memory was reached as one continuous space instead of through segment registers, which made large programs considerably easier to write and to port.
It duly became the default choice for the next generation of graphical machines — Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, Sun-1 and later the Sega Mega Drive and Neo Geo — and for arcade games throughout the 1980s. The family continued to the 68060 before Motorola bet on PowerPC, but the core lives on in embedded ColdFire processors.