Editing Atari Falcon040 (section)

== Background ==

The Falcon030, released in 1992, was the final production computer from Atari Corporation. Built around a Motorola 68030 at 16 MHz with a Motorola 56001 DSP, it was considered a capable multimedia workstation but was hampered by a 16-bit external data bus that limited CPU throughput. Even before the Falcon030 shipped, Atari engineers had begun exploring a successor based on the significantly more powerful Motorola 68040.

The 68040 offered a fully pipelined design with an integrated floating-point unit (FPU) and larger on-chip caches compared to the 68030, which would have delivered a substantial performance improvement without requiring an external FPU socket.