> What really killed 68k was the thing no one here is qualified to talk about: Motorola simply fell off the cutting edge as a semiconductor manufacturer.
Great answer but the root cause is Motorola failed to find enough customers to drive volume. Increased volume => increased profitability => money to invest in solving scaling problems. Intel otoh gained the customers and was able to scale.
Partly they failed to get volume is because every single workstation manufacture dropped them because they were clearly doing very badly.
Sun was a big costumer pushing them to make aggressive new chips and they were so disappointed with Motorola that they developed SPARC and released their first SPARC machine at the same time as he 68030 and most costumers preferred the SPARC unless they had software comparability issues.
Apple Mac did get a fair amount of volume to. And there were many other uses as well.
Sure it wasn't the wealth that Intel had, but they were hardly struggling. They clearly sold enough chips to pay a design team.
Great answer but the root cause is Motorola failed to find enough customers to drive volume. Increased volume => increased profitability => money to invest in solving scaling problems. Intel otoh gained the customers and was able to scale.