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Comment by moosedev | Hacker News Reader

Ha, I (like the commenter on the post) thought this was going to be some insane modern hobby project until I clicked through. It's in fact a set of period photos of the original (industrial) prototype. Very cool either way.

Some context for the unfamiliar: The 68030 is a historical 32-bit CPU from the Motorola 68000 series, following the original 68000, the 68010, the 68020, and their various variants. Besides a bunch of 80s Unix workstations and pre-PPC Macs, it was used in several later/higher-end Commodore Amigas and in Atari's final computer, the Atari Falcon. Unlike the 1MHz prototype in the fine article, the production chips ultimately ran from ~16MHz to ~50MHz, as I recall. Comparable in processing power and historical era to Intel's i386, as another commenter said.

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Actually the '030 was sort of a flop in the workstation market. NeXT used them, but all the big Unix vendors swung hard to RISC right as the '030 reached market. The iconic 68k workstation was and remains a Sun-3 68020 box with Sun's own MMU.

And while it's true that at release the 68030 was very competitive with Intel (but not SPARC or MIPS), by the release of the 486 two years later they'd lose that crown and never get it back. Their window turned out to be too small.

The G3 was competitive, wasnt it?

Benchmarks at the time claimed it was 2x faster than the PII.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1998-04-27-19981171...

So true or not, it must have at least been in the ballpark!

As I Mac user at the time, I remember the G3 providing a measurable performance leap!

G3 was PowerPC though, not 68k. ARM is actually the fourth Mac ISA, after 68k, PowerPC and x86!

You are correct of course!

I should remember really, I worked at Apple in the UK during the 90s! :-)

Guess I'm getting old LOL

I think my mind was getting it's memory mixed up with the PowerPC 601 and 603!

Too many product codes in my brain! :-)

Yeah, though Sun did do one 68030 workstation that I know of, the Sun 3/80, at the very end. It was packaged in the same distinctive chassis design as the SPARCstation 1 (Sun 4/60). I don't know the story, so I could only guess it might've been for hedging, or for customers still tied to m68k.

Yeah...it was pretty much an olive branch to the dead-enders who hadn't drunk the RISC coolaide. Most all of the shops I knew who bought them had some critical app that wasn't being ported to SPARC. Sun also had the 3/400 series servers that were 68030 based.

The 3/80 was also notable for using the Sparcstation expansion bus called 'SBus', which Sun used to claim SBus was an 'architecture neutral' expansion bus and tried to position it as a competitor to PCI (for a very short period of time). I went to a Sun SBus hardware design class at one point...it was a nifty design but clearly wasn't getting market traction outside Sun.

I didn't know about the 3/400 series.

One nice thing about the migration to SPARC is I was able to personally buy a retired 3/75 from the local Sun field office as a teen. Unix and megapixel display for a fraction of what assembling that with a PC would've cost. :)

HP was a big Unix vendor, but they were also vendors of other OS such as DOMAIN, and HP kept the m68k alive right through the '040s with Apollo-derived workstations that became part of the HP9000 line. DOMAIN/OS died out with PA-RISC and the 9000s segued into a new architecture, but not before cementing a legacy of a really well-done distributed network OS, a good way for college kids like me to learn assembly, and a cool OpenBSD platform for me in 1999.

I actually traveled the country replacing TI DNOS machines (running on the 9900 CPU).

The second phase of these replacements were with TI 1500 servers, running various 68k processors on nubus.

https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipme...

We also should not forget the Sega Genesis.

> We also should not forget the Sega Genesis.

Thank you - I forgot about the 68000-based consoles :) Ironic, given how many great articles about console architecture[0] have done the rounds recently! The Atari Jaguar and Sega Saturn also had 68000s among the many processors in their complex architecture, albeit explicitly as a sound coprocessor in the Saturn.

Edit: I guess I didn't exactly forget - I was restricting my mental search to the 68030 specifically. But all the 680x0 systems were cool :)

[0] e.g. https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68060

The 060 challenged in some ways, and was used on Amigas in the end days. Hybrid 060 + PPC boards existed too.

I don't think it was a flop for technical reasons so much as Motorola had spent the last few years basically telling people to stop using them and move to 88k -- -- and when that failed, to PowerPC.

Motorola could have done a Pentium competitor in the 68k architecture, but did not (well, ok, there was the '060 but it was half-hearted). They killed the line. And along with it anybody who had stayed on that ISA (Commodore, Atari). Though somewhat revived it later in the ColdFire, but only really for embedded.

The 68060 was anything but half hearted. It was one of the first commodity superscalar processors and in the end had a long life in the embedded space. But, yeah, the writing was on the wall that the 88k was the future, which to be fair is an excellent design, until it wasn't. Folks like Tektronix and DG who bet big on the 88k were not pleased.

The 060 was released[1] a full year after the Pentium and was significantly slower. It certainly wasn't a bad CPU, in an alternate universe where Motorola didn't fall as far behind on fab process as they did (or were able to find a second source to compete with Intel et. al.) you could absolutely see 68k continuing on as a dominant architecture. But in the real world of 1994, it was too little, too late, and is remembered now more as a bookend to an era than a processor design.

[1] On paper. In fact it never really "reached market" until significantly later when a few folks started shipping it in embedded contexts. The only desktop/server/bigsystem users ended up being upgrades to existing '040 designs.

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