The 68060 (April 1994) expanded the design to a superscalar version, like the Intel Pentium and NS320xx (Swordfish) series before it. Like the National Semiconductor Swordfish, and later the Nx586, AMD K5, and Intel's "Pentium Pro", the the third stage of the 10-stage 68060 pipeline translates the 680x0 instructions to a decoded RISC-like form (stored in a 16 entry buffer in stage four). There is also a branch cache, and branches are folded into the decoded instruction stream like the AT&T Hobbit and other more recent processors, then dispatched to two pipelines (three stages: Decode, addr gen, operand fetch) and finally to two of three execution units - 2 integer, 1 floating point) before reaching two 'writeback' stages. Cache sizes are doubled over the 68040.
The 68060 also also includes many innovative power-saving features (3.3V operation, execution unit pipelines could actually be shut down, reducing power consumption at the expense of slower execution, and the clock could be reduced to zero) so power use is lower than the 68040 (4-6 watts vs. 3.9-4.9). Another innovation is that simple register-register instructions which don't generate addresses may use the the address stage ALU to execute 2 cycles early.
The embedded market became the main market for the 680x0 series after workstation venders (and the Apple Macintosh) turned to faster load-store processors, so a variety of embedded versions were introduced. Later, Motorola designed a successor called Coldfire (early 1995), in which complex instructions and addressing modes (added to the 68020) were removed and the instruction set was recoded, simplifying it at the expense of compatibility (source only, not binary) with the 680x0 line.
The Coldfire 52xx (version 2 - the 51xx version 1 was a 68040-based/compatible core) architecture resmbles a stripped (single pipeline) 68060, The 5 stage pipeline is literally folded over itself - after two fetch stages and a 12-byte buffer, instructions pass through the decode and address generate stages, then loop back so the decode becomes the operand fetch stage, and the address generate becomes the execute stage (so only one ALU is required for address and execution calculations). Simple (non-memory) instructions don't need to loop back. There is no translator stage as in the 68060 because Coldfire instructions are already in RISC-like form. The 53xx added a multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit and internal clock doubling. The 54xx adds branch and assignment folding with other instructions for a cheap form of superscalar execution with little added complexity, and uses a Harvard architecture for faster memory access, plus enhancements to the instruciton set to improve code density, performance, and to add fleximility to the MAC unit.
At a quarter the physical size and a fraction of the power consumption, Coldfire is about as fast as a 68040 at the same clock rate, but the smaller design allows a faster clock rate to be acheived.
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