CPU of the Day: Scalable Superscalar 68060 Marketing Sample

Motorola 68060 Marketing Sample

The Motorola 68060 was the last of the 68k line that was begun in the late 1970’s.  The 68k began as the first commercial success of a 32 bit processor.  It wen through many upgrades, essentially proving to be worth competition (and likely a better architecture) to Intel’s x86 line.  The ‘060 was the first 68k to bring a superscalar architecture.  It could issue multiple instructions per clock, in some ways it was better then the Intel Pentium.  The 68060 was released in 1994 but never achieved wide success.  By the time of its introduction Motorola had thrown most of its weight behind the PowerPC of the AIM Alliance. Eventually the 68060, which was released on a 0.6micron process at 50MHz, would be moved to 0.42 micron and hit 75MHz.

It, unfortunately, suffered the same fate as the 88000 RISC processor, a slow but inevitable fading away.  The 68k line (mostly the 68000 core, or its derivative, the CPU32) lives on in many of Freescale’s products.

The chip shown is what is known as a Marketing Sample.  These typically were only an empty package, given to sale people and distributors as gifts or sales aids.  They typically feature a flashy logo, more color, and often, like this one, a sales pitch. ‘Scalable Superscalar’.  It seems that the 68060 proved less salable then it was scalable.