Motorola 68030

The Motorola 68030 is a 32-bit microprocessor in Motorola's 68000 family. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is often referred to as the 030.

The 68030 features an on-chip split instruction and data cache of 256 bytes each. It also has an on-chip memory management unit. The 68881 and the faster 68882 FPU (floating point unit) chips could be used with the 68030. A lower cost version of the 68030, the Motorola 68EC030, was also released, lacking the on-chip MMU.

As a microarchitecture, the 68030 is uninteresting. It is little more than a 68020 core with an added data cache (which made little difference to performance) and a process shrink. Motorola used the process shrink to allow them to pack more hardware on the die. In this case it was the MMU, a 68851 compatible. Per clock, however, the 68030 did not differentiate itself in performance from the 68020 that it was derived from. The finer manufacturing process, however, allowed Motorola to scale the processor to 50MHz. The EC variety topped out at 40MHz.

The 68030 was used in many models of the Apple Macintosh II and Amiga series of personal computers as well as the Atari Falcon.

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