Will there be an ACA1240 or ACA1260?

[WolfToTheMoon]

It's curious that Motorola never did a process shrink of the 040(or did they), which would have solved the heating issue...

First 060 chips were 0.6 microns and they don't overclock nicely. Second gen is 0.42 and lastly, latest revisions made in 99' are 0.32 - these will overclock to 100+ MHz easily. Atari guys seem to run them comfortably well over 100 MHz with SDRAM.


With this in mind, it was possible to make a 0.35 micron 060 in late 95/early 96 - this would have allowed speeds up to around 100 MHz and would have made 68K Amiga competitive, CPU wise, with Pentium P5 PCs and early PPC  Apple machines. A shame that Motorola dumped 68K.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Going RISC was "in" in the late 80s/early 90s.

At the time, it was possible to design a fairly competitive and cheap RISC design on a budget. So pretty much everyone did. Most every bigger workstation maker had an inhouse RISC design in the works(SPARC, DEC Alpha, HP PA RISC, SGI bought MIPS..). Add to that that most IT experts prophesized the death of CISC/x86.
But in the early-mid 90s, Intel(and Motorola with 040 and 060) showed that RISC features can be implemented in a legacy x86/68k... Rest is history.

Sad thing is 68060 was pretty competitive at that time, especially in integer performance. All it needed was a fully pipelined FPU(P5 Pentium had one) and out of order execution(P6 Pentium). P6 evolved to Core processors of today(Pentium 4 was a different design). So 68K in 2012 was very doable