Motorola 68060
Encyclopedia
32-bit
The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
from Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
released in 1994. It is the successor to the Motorola 68040
Motorola 68040
The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060. There was no 68050. In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the '040 ....
and is the highest performing member of the 680x0
68k
The Motorola 680x0/m68000/68000 is a family of 32-bit CISC microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and were the primary competitors of Intel's x86 microprocessors...
family. Two derivatives were produced, the 68LC060 and the 68EC060.
Architecture
There is an LC (Low-Cost) version, without an FPU and EC - Embedded Controller, without MMU and FPU. The 68060 design was led by Joe Circello.The 68060 shares most architectural features with the P5
P5 (microarchitecture)
The original Pentium microprocessor was introduced on March 22, 1993. Its microarchitecture, deemed P5, was Intel's fifth-generation and first superscalar x86 microarchitecture. As a direct extension of the 80486 architecture, it included dual integer pipelines, a faster FPU, wider data bus,...
Pentium. Both have a very similar superscalar
Superscalar
A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism called instruction level parallelism within a single processor. It therefore allows faster CPU throughput than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate...
in-order
Tree traversal
In computer science, tree-traversal refers to the process of visiting each node in a tree data structure, exactly once, in a systematic way. Such traversals are classified by the order in which the nodes are visited...
dual instruction pipeline
Instruction pipeline
An instruction pipeline is a technique used in the design of computers and other digital electronic devices to increase their instruction throughput ....
configuration, and an instruction decoder which breaks down complex instructions into simpler ones before execution. However, a significant difference is that the 68060 FPU is not pipelined and is therefore up to three times slower than the Pentium in floating point applications. In contrast to that, integer multiplications and bit shifting instructions are significantly faster on the 68060. An interesting feature of the 68060 is the ability to execute simple instructions in the address generation unit (AGU) and thereby supply the result two cycles before the ALU
Arithmetic logic unit
In computing, an arithmetic logic unit is a digital circuit that performs arithmetic and logical operations.The ALU is a fundamental building block of the central processing unit of a computer, and even the simplest microprocessors contain one for purposes such as maintaining timers...
. Another point of interest is that large amounts of commercial compiled code were analyzed for clues as to which instructions would be the best candidates for performance optimization.
Against the Pentium, the 68060 could perform better on mixed code, Pentium's decoder could not issue an FP instruction every opportunity and hence the FPU wasn't superscalar as the ALUs were. If the 68060's non-pipelined FPU could accept an instruction, it could be issued one by the decoder. This meant that optimizing for the 68060 was easier, no rules prevented FP instructions from being issued whenever was convenient for the programmer other than well understood instruction latencies. However, with properly optimized and scheduled code, the Pentium's FPU was capable of double the clock for clock throughput of the 68060's FPU.
The 68060 was the last development of the 680x0 series for general purpose use, abandoned in favour of the PowerPC
PowerPC
PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
chips. It saw use in some late-model Amiga
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
machines and Amiga accelerator cards as well as some Atari ST
Atari ST
The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...
clones and a Falcon accelerator board (CT060), and very late models of the Alpha Microsystems
Alpha Microsystems
Alpha Microsystems is a computer company founded in 1977 by John French, Dick Wilcox and Bob Hitchcock. The first Alpha Micro computer was the S-100 AM-100, based upon the WD16 microprocessor chipset from Western Digital...
multiuser computers before their migration to x86, but Apple Inc. and the Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
world had moved onto various RISC platforms by the time the '060 was available. The 68060 was introduced at 50 MHz on Motorola's 0.6 µm manufacturing process. A few years later it was shrunk to 0.42 µm and clock speed raised to 66 MHz and 75 MHz.
Developments of the basic core continue, intended for embedded systems. Here they are combined with a number of peripheral interfaces to reduce the overall complexity and power requirements of a design. A number of chips, each with different sets of interfaces, are sold under the name ColdFire
Freescale ColdFire
The Freescale ColdFire is a microprocessor that derives from the Motorola 68000 family architecture, manufactured for embedded systems development by Freescale Semiconductor .-Instruction set:...
and DragonBall
Freescale DragonBall
Motorola/Freescale Semiconductor's DragonBall, or MC68328, is a microcontroller design based on the famous 68000 core, but implemented as an all-in-one low-power solution for handheld computer use...
.
History
The even numbers (68000, 68020, 68040, 68060) were reserved for major revisions to the 680x0 core architecture. The odd numbers (68010, 68030, 68050, 68070) were reserved for upgrades to the architecture of the previous chip. No 68050 or 68070 was ever produced by Motorola.For example, the Motorola 68010 (and the obscure 68012) was a 68000 with improvements to the loop instruction and the ability to suspend then continue an instruction in the event of a page fault, enabling the use of virtual memory
Virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory is a memory management technique developed for multitasking kernels. This technique virtualizes a computer architecture's various forms of computer data storage , allowing a program to be designed as though there is only one kind of memory, "virtual" memory, which...
with the appropriate MMU
Memory management unit
A memory management unit , sometimes called paged memory management unit , is a computer hardware component responsible for handling accesses to memory requested by the CPU...
hardware. There were, however, no major overhauls of the core architecture. Similarly, the Motorola 68030 was a process improvement on the 68020 with the MMU and a small data cache
Cache
In computer engineering, a cache is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data that is stored within a cache might be values that have been computed earlier or duplicates of original values that are stored elsewhere...
(256 bytes) moved on-chip. The 68030 was available in speed ratings up to 50 MHz.
The jump from the 68000/68010 to the 68020/68030, however, represented a major overhaul, with too many individual changes to list here.
By the time the 68060 was in production, Motorola had abandoned development of the 680x0-type chips in favour of PowerPC
PowerPC
PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
. The 68060 was the last 680x0-type processor from Motorola.
There was a so-called 68070 processor, produced by Signetics
Signetics
Signetics, once a major player in semiconductor manufacturing, made a variety of devices which included integrated circuits, bipolar and MOS, the Dolby circuit, logic, memory and analog circuits. They developed microprocessors like the 2650, the bipolar 8X300 and had licensed Motorola 68000...
(Philips), and was a modestly improved 68000 series processor, with a simple, on-chip MMU and I²C
I²C
I²C is a multi-master serial single-ended computer bus invented by Philips that is used to attach low-speed peripherals to a motherboard, embedded system, cellphone, or other electronic device. Since the mid 1990s, several competitors I²C ("i-squared cee" or "i-two cee"; Inter-Integrated Circuit;...
bus support. It came out long before the 68060, and was used mostly as an embedded processor in some consumer electronics items.
Usage
Perhaps its most memorable use was in American broadcast television graphics. ChyronChyron Corporation
The Chyron Corporation is a Melville, N.Y.-based company that develops products and services for digital broadcast graphics creation. The company’s solutions, which include the AXIS Graphics online content creation software and order management system and a range of on-air graphics systems, clip...
's Infinit!, Max!, and Maxine! series of television character generators used the 68060 as the main processor. These character generators were a fixture on many American television networks' affiliate stations.
In desktops, the 68060 was used in some variants of the Amiga 4000T
Amiga 4000T
The Amiga 4000T, also known as A4000T, was a tower version of the A4000 computer. Using the AGA chipset, it was originally released in small quantities in 1994 with a 25 MHz Motorola 68040 CPU, and re-released in greater numbers by Escom in 1995, after Commodore's demise, along with a new...
produced by Amiga Technologies, and available as a third party upgrade for other Amiga models. It was also used in the Amiga clone DraCo
Draco
Draco was the first legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece. He replaced the prevailing system of oral law and blood feud by a written code to be enforced only by a court...
non-linear video system.
The 68060 was also used in Nortel Meridian
Nortel Meridian
Nortel Meridian is a private branch exchange. It provides advanced voice features, data connectivity, LAN communications, computer telephony integration , and information services for communication applications ranging from 60 to 80,000 lines.-History:...
1 Option 51, 61 and 81 large office PBX systems, powering the CP3 and CP4 core processor boards. A pair of these boards each sporting a 68060 could be used to make the PBX fault tolerant. This was a logical application as previous Meridian 1 cores used other Motorola chips. Nortel has since changed the architecture to use Intel processors.
Also the Motorola Vanguard 6560 multiprotocol router used a 50 MHz 68EC060 processor.
Motorola MVME
Motorola Single Board Computers
Motorola Single Board Computers is Motorola's production line of computer boards for embedded systems. There were three different lines : mvme68k, mvmeppc and mvme88k. The first version of the board appeared in 1988...
-17x and Force Computer SYS68K VMEbus
VMEbus
VMEbus is a computer bus standard, originally developed for the Motorola 68000 line of CPUs, but later widely used for many applications and standardized by the IEC as ANSI/IEEE 1014-1987. It is physically based on Eurocard sizes, mechanicals and connectors , but uses its own signalling system,...
systems also used a 68060 CPU.
Variants
- 68060 – CPU with MMUMemory management unitA memory management unit , sometimes called paged memory management unit , is a computer hardware component responsible for handling accesses to memory requested by the CPU...
and FPU. - 68LC060 – CPU with MMU but without FPU.
- 68EC060 – CPU with neither MMU nor FPU.
Technical data
| Work frequency | 50, 60, 66, 75 MHz |
| Voltage supply |
|
| Temperature | ( with the current mask) |
| Production process | Static-CMOS and later |
| Chip carrier Chip carrier A chip carrier, also known as a chip container or chip package, is a container for a transistor or an integrated circuit. The carrier usually provides metal leads, or "pins", which are sturdy enough to electrically and mechanically connect the fragile chip to a circuit board. This connection may be... |
PGA 206 Pin grid array A pin grid array, often abbreviated PGA, is a type of integrated circuit packaging. In a PGA, the package is square or roughly square, and the pins are arranged in a regular array on the underside of the package... (compatible with 68040 Motorola 68040 The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060. There was no 68050. In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the '040 .... ), TBGA 304 31*31*1.7P1.27 |
| Address bus | 32 Bit |
| Data bus | 32 bit |
| Instruction set Instruction set An instruction set, or instruction set architecture , is the part of the computer architecture related to programming, including the native data types, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O... |
CISC |
| Cache | DCache ICache FIFO Instruction Buffer
|
| Register |
|
| Transistors | |
| Performance |
|
Trivia
- Over-clocked variants exist at 100/133 MHz (partly in connection with water cooling)
- LC and EC variants are defective CPUs with where the FPU or MMU logic has exhibit too many errors and therefore were deactivated
- The Viper 1260 (a Amiga 1200Amiga 1200The Amiga 1200, or A1200 , was Commodore International's third-generation Amiga computer, aimed at the home market...
turbo-card) used a 68060 rated at 50 MHz over-clocked to 56 MHz - The Apollo 1260 (a Amiga 1200Amiga 1200The Amiga 1200, or A1200 , was Commodore International's third-generation Amiga computer, aimed at the home market...
turbo-card) can use the 68060 Rev.6 with a 80 MHz clock - The CT60 (an ATARI FalconAtari FalconThe Atari Falcon030 Computer System was Atari Corporation's final computer product. Codenamed Sparrow, the machine was based on a Motorola 68030 main CPU, and had a Motorola 56000 digital signal processor, a feature which distinguished it from most other microcomputers of the era.-History:The...
expansion-card) reaches clock rates from 90 MHz to over 100 MHz with rev.6 processors