They should.

The 68K line was the Itanium of it's time. It overpromised and underdelivered and was crushed by the 286 and 386. Many vendors made machines based on it (Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, Sun Microsystems, Sinclair QL, ...) and all of those vendors either went out of business or transitioned to RISC architectures in a hurry. It was one of the many near death experiences the Mac platform had.

It was more successful than the beautiful losers such as the TMS9900, iAPX 432, i860, NS32000, but it hit the end of track and left everyone in the lurch.

Performance per clock cycle was much better on 68k. I understood that they lost out because the world adopted DOS and DOS run only on x86. Then... consequences. The only surviving platform that used to run on 68k is the Mac, which was a minor player even at the time.

68k were extremely expensive at the time, that's why they lost desktop market to their 80x86 killer. An additional factor was what XT and then AT became an open architecture.

I never understood why Motorola couldn't keep up with Intel in the speed race. If they had, 68K would be the dominant architecture today.

From what I remember, 68k processors were used by PalmPilot starting from the US Robotics days. I wonder if they had any particular power efficiency to make it better for Palm. Either that or I am remembering it wrong.

They are also used in automotive as part of the Coldfire CPU series.

But I think a lot of this usage goes back to the days where embedded CPU families had been a lot more fragmented, and companies usually picked one family of their favorite supplier (based on pricing, fulfilling the use-case, etc) and then just sticked to it due to code not being particularly portable.

Since that time the amount of CPU families that are actually used shrank drastically, and it's a lot more likely that all of those use-cases just pick ARM.

what is the main product line of PalmPilot?

Thank you for the link.