> Overall, it got lots of traction commercially; it ....
Before ARM the m68k was possibly the most deployed processor architecture in history. In the late 1990s it was in printers, cars, personal digital assistants, erc, as well as all the home computers, arcades and unix workstations it found it's way into in the 1980s and early 1990s.
It's sucessor, the Coldfire, could have taken ARMs place...
Probably this is the reason it's still in the Linux source tree!
My money would be on something smaller such as the 8051 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-51)
Also, between m68k and ARM there was PowerPC. It got used a lot in embedded systems. Because “the newer the car, the more microprocessors it has”, chances are it got used more than m68k.
FWIW, Google’s AI gives me:
- for the m68k: “industry analysis and historical data indicate that hundreds of millions of units were produced across the architecture's lifespan”
- for PowerPC: “By 2008, Freescale Semiconductor had already shipped over 100 million Power Architecture-based MCUs for automotive powertrain management alone. Hundreds of millions more have since been produced for networking, industrial automation, and aerospace applications.”
- for the 8051: “according to industry accounts and semiconductor historians, the cumulative production of 8051-based microcontrollers is estimated to be on the order of billions to tens of billions of units”
Also MIPS. It was VERY popular in embedded. Also Sony’s PS1 and PS2.
But I still think 68k was king of that era for discrete CPU's that could go anywhere, and run a high level OS/complex software, before the MCU and then SoC era came and stole m68k's crown.
Sure, PPC took the m68k's role of discrete CPU in automotive, aerospace, networking and consoles for a while, but I don't think it is the king.
Back to TFA, I think the m68k got a bit more than just "commercial traction"! Which is why it will hopefully stay in the kernel for a long time.