The Macintosh IIfx was on the market from 1990 to 1992. It was the fasted macintosh available at the time. It ran on the Motorola 68030 which was clocked at 40MHz. The machine came with 4MByte RAM, expandable to 128MByte. In addition the IIfx had 32KByte of Level 2 cache, six NuBus slots, and a number of proprietary ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) and coprocessors.

This machine was designed for speed. the Asics needed system-specific drivers to run. Even the RAM was optimized. The system uses high-speed (80 nano-second) RAM using 64 pin dual-ported SIMMS. Other Macintosh models used 30-pin SIMMS. The extra pins allowed a separate path to allow latched read and write operations.

The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit microprocessor that was first released in 1979. It was widely used in computers and other electronic devices during the 1980s and early 1990s. The 68000 was known for its advanced architecture, which included a 32-bit internal bus and a 24-bit address bus, allowing it to access up to 16 megabytes of memory. This made it more powerful than many other processors of its time, such as the Intel 8086 and Zilog Z80. It was also designed to be highly modular and expandable, with a large number of on-chip and off-chip peripherals.

Some of the most famous and successful computers that used the 68000 was the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, both of which were popular in the home and personal computer markets. Additionally, it was also used in workstations, such as the Sun 3 and Apollo DN3000, and in a wide variety of embedded systems and industrial control systems. The 68000 was also used in the Macintosh, the first model of the Macintosh was powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU. The processor was eventually succeeded by the 68020 and 68030, which offered improved performance and additional features.

The 68000 has a 32-bit instruction set, with 32-bit registers and a 16-bit internal data bus. The address bus is 24-bit and does not use memory segmentation, making it easier to address memory. There are three ALU's (Arithmetic Logic Unit), two for calculating addresses, and one for data, and the chip has a 16-bit external address bus.

The 68000 architecture was expanded with 32-bit ALUs, and caches. Here is a list with some 680x0 versions and their major improvements:

• 68010 - Virtual memory support
• 68020 - 32-bit ALU & Instruction Cache
• 68030 - On-Chip MMU, 2x 256 byte cache
• 68040 - 2x 4K Cache, 6 stage pipeline, FPU
• 68LC040 - No Floating Point Unit (FPU)
• 68060 - 2x 8K Cache, 10 stage pipelinet

Source: WikiPedia - Motorola 6800
Source: WikiPedia - 68000 Series