Motorola’s 68K family has been the market leader in embedded applications for many years. As a result of this, there is a great wealth of experience in the industry surrounding the architecture. The highly competitive nature of the embedded systems market compels designers to strive to find the best trade-off between price and performance for microprocessors. Methods used by microprocessor manufacturers to
improve processor performance such as pipelining or increasing on-chip cache can be very expensive with respect to silicon area. To overcome this problem and minimize cost with maximum performance, it may be necessary to implement changes in the architecture. This can result in difficulties when a designer wishes to upgrade their design. There may be implications for hardware and software compatibility which would not be present if the architecture remained unmodified.