What is Motorola 68010?

Information about Motorola 68010

The Motorola MC68010 processor is a 16/32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1982.[1] In common with the Motorola 68000 naming convention, it is usually just referred to as the 010 (pronounced oh-one-oh).

It fixes several small flaws in the 68000, including not meeting Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements because one instruction, MOVE from SR, are user instead of supervisor mode, and no support for returning from bus faults (which made it impossible to use it for virtual memory).

Additionally, the 68010 had a "loop mode", considered a mini instruction cache, which accelerates loops that consist of only 2 instructions. The overall speed gain compared to the 68000 was below 10% in practice, so it did not make much sense to upgrade the 68000 CPU with the 68010, even though the two were pin-compatible.

The 68010 was not 100% software compatible with the 68000. The most problematic difference was the exception stack frame.

Enlarge picture
Motorola 68451 MMU
The 68010 could be used with the 68451 MMU, but problems with the design, in particular a 1 clock memory access penalty made this configuration unpopular and led to other vendors such as Sun Microsystems using their own MMU design.

The 68010 was never as popular as the 68000, as the added complexity and cost turned out to not be worthwhile in practice. Most vendors looking for the MMU functionality waited for the 68020 instead. Due to the 68010's small speed boost over the 68000 and its support for virtual memory, though, it can be found in a number of Unix workstations with a custom MMU (such as the AT&T Unix-PC and early HP9000's like the model 300 and 310) and various research machines, and it was used sometimes to add a small boost to Atari ST and Amiga computers.

The 68010+ had a feature useful to hackers. The Vector Base Register (VBR) allows the exception vectors to be moved from low memory to an arbitrary location. A monitor/debugger program can intercept the interrupts, and maintain the ability to activate on demand even if the low-memory vectors are modified. Unfortunately on reset the VBR is still zero and this means that the 68010+ still use the address stored in memory address 0 as the initial PC.

Notes and references

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Motorola/Freescale processors
The 6800 family6809 (see also: Hitachi 6309)
68000 family68000 68008 68010 68012 68020 68030 68040 68060 ColdFire DragonBall
Low-cost variants68EC000 68EC020 68EC030 68EC040 68LC040
Pre-PowerPC RISC88000
Floating-point coprocessors68881, 68882
PowerPC familyPPC e200 PPC 603e/e300 PPC 75x PPC e500 PPC 74xx/e600 PowerQUICC family
Microprocessor

Die of an Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor (actual size: 12×6.75 mm) in its packaging
Date Invented: Late 1960s/Early 1970s (see article for explanation)

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Motorola Inc.

Public (NYSE: MOT )
Founded 1928
Headquarters Schaumburg, Illinois, USA

Key people Edward Zander, CEO & Chairman
Industry Telecommunications
Products Embedded systems
Microprocessors
Mobile phones
Two-Way radios
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1979 1980 1981 - 1982 - 1983 1984 1985

Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII
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A memory management unit (MMU), sometimes called paged memory management unit (PMMU), is a computer hardware component responsible for handling accesses to memory requested by the central processing unit (CPU).
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clock signal is a signal used to coordinate the actions of two or more circuits. A clock signal oscillates between a high and a low state, normally with a 50% duty cycle, and is usually in the form of a square wave.
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Computer data storage, computer memory, and often casually storage or memory refer to computer components, devices and recording media that retain digital data used for computing for some interval of time.
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Sun Microsystems

Public (NASDAQ:  JAVA )
Founded 1982
Headquarters Santa Clara, California, United States

Key people Scott McNealy, Chairman
Jonathan I.
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The Motorola 68020 is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. It is the successor to the Motorola 68010 and is succeeded by the Motorola 68030.

Description

The 68020 (usually just referred to as the '020, pronounced oh-two-oh or oh-twenty
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Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy.
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workstation, such as a Unix workstation, RISC workstation or engineering workstation, is a high-end desktop or deskside microcomputer designed for technical applications.
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The 6800 is a microprocessor produced by Motorola and released shortly after the Intel 8080 in 1975. It had 78 instructions, including the (in)famous, undocumented Halt and Catch Fire (HCF) bus test instruction.
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The Motorola 6809 is an 8-bit (arguably, an 8/16-bit) microprocessor CPU from Motorola, introduced circa 1979. It was a major advance over both its predecessor, the Motorola 6800, and the related, MOS Technology 6502.
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The 6309 is Hitachi's CMOS version of the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. While in "Emulation Mode" it is fully compatible with the 6809. To the 6809 specifications it adds higher clock rates, enhanced features, new instructions, and additional registers.
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The Motorola 680x0/m68k/68k/68K family of CISC microprocessor CPU chips were 32-bit from the start, and were the primary competition for the Intel x86 family of chips in personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s.
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The Motorola 68000 is a CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector). As the first member of the successful 32-bit m68k family of microprocessors, it is generally software forward compatible with the
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The Motorola 68008 is an 8/16/32-bit microprocessor made by Motorola. It is a version of the Motorola 68000 with an 8-bit external data bus, as well as a smaller address bus.

The original 68000 had a 24-bit address bus and a 16-bit data bus.
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The Motorola MC68012 processor is a 16/32-bit microprocessor from the early 1980s. It is an 84-pin PGA version of the Motorola MC68010. The memory space was extended to 2GiB (causing the same issue as the 68020 for any programs using the high byte of an address except those only
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The Motorola 68020 is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. It is the successor to the Motorola 68010 and is succeeded by the Motorola 68030.

Description

The 68020 (usually just referred to as the '020, pronounced oh-two-oh or oh-twenty
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The Motorola 68030 is a 32-bit microprocessor in Motorola's 68000 family. Released in 1987, the 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040.
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The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060 (the 68050 project having been abandoned.
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The Motorola 68060 is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1994, and is the successor to the Motorola 68040. The 68060 is the highest performance 680x0 family processor available.
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The Freescale ColdFire is a 68k architecture microprocessor manufactured for embedded systems development by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly the semiconductor sector of Motorola).
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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. It was designed by Motorola in Hong Kong, China.
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The 68EC000 is a microprocessor from Motorola. It is a low-cost version of the Motorola 68000, designed for embedded controller applications. The 68EC000 can have either a 8-bit or 16-bit data bus, switchable at reset.
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The 68EC020 is a microprocessor from Motorola. It is a lower cost version of the Motorola 68020, the difference between the two being that the 68EC020 only has a 24-bit address bus, rather than the 32-bit address bus of the full 68020, and thus is only able to address 16 MB of RAM.
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The 68EC030 is a microprocessor from Motorola. It is a lower cost version of the Motorola 68030, the difference between the two being that the 68EC030 does not have an on-chip memory management unit.
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The 68EC040 is a version of the Motorola 68040 microprocessor intended for embedded controllers. It differs from the 68040 in that it has no FPU or MMU. This makes it less expensive and draw less power.
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The 68LC040 is a low cost version of the Motorola 68040 microprocessor with no FPU. This makes it less expensive and draw less power. Although the CPU now fits into a feature chart more like the 68020, it continues to include the 040's caches and pipeline and is thus
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reduced instruction set computer (RISC, pronounced like "risk") is a CPU design philosophy that favors an instruction set reduced both in size and complexity of addressing modes, in order to enable easier implementation, greater instruction level parallelism, and
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The 88000 (m88k for short) is a microprocessor design produced by Motorola. It was their attempt at a home-grown RISC (now often referred to as a load-store) architecture, started in the 1980s.
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