< processor > A microprocessor from Motorola . It was the successor to the Motorola 68000 and was followed by the Motorola 68020 . Some instructions which were previously user mode were made system mode , which necessitated patches to a few programs.
The 68010's main advantage over the 68000 was that it could recover from a bus fault . The 68000 microcode didn't save enough state to restart all instructions; the 68010 corrected this fault. This allowed it to use paged virtual memory .
The 68010's DBxx (decrement and branch) instructions could hold and execute the preceding instruction in the prefetch buffer , allowing some two-instruction loops to execute without refetching instructions.
At one time there was a 68010 variant that was pin-for-pin compatible with the 68000. Early Amiga hackers replaced their 68000s with 68010s in order to get a small performance increase.
(1995-11-29)