Editing Motorola 88000 (section)

===Release===
By 1987 it was widely known that Motorola was designing its own RISC processor. Referred to by the computer industry as the "78000",{{efn|It is not clear whether this was an official name or not.}} an homage to the earlier 68000,{{sfn|Lid}} it became the 88000 when it was released in April 1988.

As a side-effect of the complexity of the design, the CPU did not fit on a single chip. The 68030, released a year earlier, had 273,000 transistors, including the [[arithmetic logic unit]] (ALU) and [[memory management unit]] (MMU) on a single chip, with the optional [[floating point unit]] (FPU) as a separate chip. In contrast, the 88000 packaged the ALU and FPU together on the 750,000 transistor MC88100, and the [[memory management unit]] (MMU) and 16&nbsp;KB [[static RAM]] cache in the 750,000 transistor MC88200. In contrast to the 68030 where the FPU was truly optional, a practical 88000 system could not be built without at least one MC88200. Systems could include more than one MC88200, producing larger caches and allowing multiple paths to main memory for improved performance.{{sfn|Lid}}

Aimed at the high-end of the market, it was claimed to be the fastest 32-bit processor in the world when it was released. Running at 20&nbsp;MHz, it reached 34,000&nbsp;[[Dhrystones]] or 17&nbsp;[[VAX Unit of Performance|VUPS]],{{sfn|April}}{{efn|One VUPS is roughly equivalent to 1 MIPS.}} compared to about 12&nbsp;MIPS for a 12.5&nbsp;MHz [[SPARC]] of the same vintage in the [[SPARCstation]], or around 3.3&nbsp;MIPS of the 20&nbsp;MHz 68030. It was also available as a 25&nbsp;MHz part at 21&nbsp;MIPS, 48,387&nbsp;Dhrystones.{{sfn|Volume}}

At the time, Motorola marketed the 88000 strictly to the high-end of the market, including "telecommunications, artificial intelligence, graphics, three-dimensional animation, simulation, parallel processing and supercomputers", while it suggested the existing 68k series would continue to be used in the workstation market. Instead, most potential customers ignored the 88000,{{sfn|April}} and the system saw little use.