Editing Motorola 68000 series (section)

==68050 and 68070==
{{Unreferenced section|date=October 2013}}

Motorola mainly used even numbers for major revisions to the CPU core such as 68000, 68020, 68040 and 68060. The 68010 was a revised version of the 68000 with minor modifications to the core, and likewise the 68030 was a revised 68020 with some more powerful features, none of them significant enough to classify as a major upgrade to the core.

The 68050 was reportedly "a minor upgrade of the 68040" that lost a battle for resources within Motorola, competing against projects that had been scheduled to succeed it: the 0.5μm, low-power, low-cost "LP040", and the superscalar, superpipelined "Q", borrowing from the 88110 and anticipated as the 68060.<ref name="unigramx19920413_motorola">{{ cite news | url=https://archive.org/details/UnigramX1992366-416/page/n100/mode/1up | title=Motorola 68060 "Could Impact PowerPC" | work=Unigram/X | date=13 April 1992 | access-date=22 December 2024 | pages=3 }}</ref> Subsequent reports indicated that Motorola had considered the 68050 as not meriting the necessary investment in production of the part.<ref name="unigramx19930419_motorola">{{ cite news | url=https://archive.org/details/UnigramX1993417-467/page/n120/mode/1up | title=Motorola to Sample 68060 in July | work=Unigram/X | date=19 April 1993 | access-date=22 December 2024 | pages=3 }}</ref> Odd-numbered releases had always been reactions to issues raised within the prior even numbered part; hence, it was generally expected that the 68050 would have reduced the 68040's power consumption (and thus heat dissipation), improved exception handling in the FPU, used a smaller feature size and optimized the microcode in line with program use of instructions. Many of these optimizations were included with the 68060 and were part of its design goals. For any number of reasons, likely that the 68060 was in development, that the Intel 80486 was not progressing as quickly as Motorola assumed it would, and that 68060 was a demanding project, the 68050 was cancelled early in development.

There is also no revision of the [[68060]], as Motorola was in the process of shifting away from the 68000 and [[88000|88k]] processor lines into its new [[PowerPC]] business, so the 68070 was never developed. Had it been, it would have been a revised 68060, likely with a superior FPU (pipelining was widely speculated upon on Usenet).

There was a CPU with the [[68070]] designation, which was a licensed and somewhat slower version of the 16/32-bit 68000 with a basic DMA controller, [[I²C]] host and an on-chip serial port. This 68070 was used as the main CPU in the [[Philips]] [[CD-i]]. This CPU was, however, produced by [[Philips]] and not officially part of Motorola's 680x0 lineup.

Motorola had announced a product roadmap beyond the 68060 featuring the 68080 rated at 200-350 MIPS, due by 1995, and a product rated at 800 MIPS, possibly with the name 68100, by 2000.<ref name="unigramx19930419_motorola"/>