The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060 (the 68050 project having been abandoned.) In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the 040 (pronounced oh-forty). The stripped-down version of the 68040 that lacks the FPU is the 68LC040.
In Macintosh computers, the 68040 was found mainly in the high-end Quadras. The fastest 68040 processor was clocked at 40 MHz and it was only used in the Quadra 840AV. The more expensive models in the (short-lived) mid-high Centris also used the 68040, while the cheaper Centris and Performas used the 68LC040. The 68040 was also used in other personal computers such as the Amiga 4000, as well as a number of Workstations and later versions of the NeXT computers.
The 68040 is the first 680x0 family member with an on-chip FPU (floating point unit). It thus includes all of the functionality that previously required external chips, namely the FPU and MMU (which was added in the 030). It also has split instruction and data caches of 4 kilobytes each. It is fully pipelined, with six stages.
