Motorola 68050

The Motorola 68050 was a continuation of the 68040 intended to smooth over issues which had been observed with the 68040 Fact|date=September 2008. Even numbered releases were entirely new architectures, odd numbered ones were advancements to the previous architecture. It was abandoned early in development.

From issues identified with the 68040, it was expectedWho|date=September 2008 that the 68050 would have reduced the 68040's power consumption (and thus heat dissipation), improved exception handling in the FPU, used a smaller feature size and optimized the microcode in line with program use of instructions. Many of these optimizations were included with the 68060. Motorola and Intel had long had reasonable feature parity, the 68040 described an architecture similar to the 80386 (but much higher performance) and inferior to the 80486 Fact|date=September 2008. The 68050 was expected to be on parity or thereabout with the 80486.

The above, however, was merely expectation within the contemporary industry. Early in its design, the 68050 was cancelled for any number of reasons, frequently cited are poor performance, high expense for the level of performance and a Motorola wanting to concentrate on embedded controllers and the 68060 project Fact|date=September 2008.