Motorola 68040 in the context of "Power Macintosh"

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⭐ Core Definition: Motorola 68040

The Motorola 68040 ("sixty-eight-oh-forty") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the '040 (pronounced oh-four-oh or oh-forty).

The 68040 was the first 680x0 family member with an on-chip Floating-Point Unit (FPU). It thus included all of the functionality that previously required external chips, namely the FPU and Memory Management Unit (MMU), which was added in the 68030. It also had split instruction and data caches of 4 kilobytes each. It was fully pipelined, with six stages.

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👉 Motorola 68040 in the context of Power Macintosh

The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006.

Described by Macworld as "the most important technical evolution of the Macintosh since the Mac II debuted in 1987", it is the first computer with the PowerPC CPU architecture, the flagship product of the AIM alliance. Existing software for the Motorola 68k processors of previous Macintoshes do not run on it natively, so a Mac 68k emulator is in System 7.1.2. It provides good compatibility, at about two-thirds of the speed of contemporary Macintosh Quadra machines.

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Motorola 68040 in the context of Digital signal processor

A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit chips. They are widely used in audio signal processing, telecommunications, digital image processing, radar, sonar and speech recognition systems, and in common consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones, disk drives and high-definition television (HDTV) products.

The goal of a DSP is usually to measure, filter or compress continuous real-world analog signals. Most general-purpose microprocessors can also execute digital signal processing algorithms successfully, but may not be able to keep up with such processing continuously in real-time. Also, dedicated DSPs usually have better power efficiency, thus they are more suitable in portable devices such as mobile phones because of power consumption constraints. DSPs often use special memory architectures that are able to fetch multiple data or instructions at the same time.

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LINKED FROM (PARENTS)
← Digital signal processor ← Power Macintosh
LINKS TO (CHILDREN)
32-bit microprocessor → Motorola 68000 series → Motorola 68030 → Motorola 68060 → Motorola 68000 family → Floating-point unit → Memory management unit → Kilobyte → Instruction pipeline →