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Motorola 68030

32-bit microprocessor

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionFeb 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ378761
Source-derived summary

The Motorola 68030 ("sixty-eight-oh-thirty") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 family. It was released in 1987. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is often referred to as the 030 (pronounced oh-three-oh or oh-thirty).

The 68030 is essentially a 68020 with a memory management unit (MMU) and instruction and data caches of 256 bytes each. It added a burst mode for the caches, where four longwords can be loaded into the cache in a single operation. The MMU was mostly compatible with the external 68851 that would be used with the 68020, but being internal allowed it to access memory one cycle faster than a 68020/68851 combo. The 68030 did not include a built-in floating-point unit (FPU), and was generally used with the 68881 and the faster 68882. The addition of the FPU was a major design note of the subsequent 68040. The 68030 typically increases performance by ≈5% over the 68020, while reducing power draw by ≈25%.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Motorola 68030” is 32-bit microprocessor. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Motorola, 32-bit and microprocessor, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1987—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Motorola, 32-bit and microprocessor is the immediate research focus.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q378761. The Library of Congress control number is sh88005907. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Motorola 68030” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.