The MC68000 family and distributed processing

ABSTRACT

The key philosophy today is to build parts that will be upward compatible with multiple processor systems of the future so that there is a migration path from existing single-bus systems to the higher-performance, multiple-local-bus systems of the future. An important parameter of these systems will be system performance, and the need for this performance is increasing faster than vendors can increase single-processor performance.

The need for multiple-processor systems is clear in the future. Knowing this, the designers of the MC68000 made sure to include all the necessary hooks into the processor design to support multiple processor architecture in the future. Some features of the existing processor that might not be used often today will become very important to future members of the MC68000 peripheral family. Some of these features and systems will be discussed here.