Just yesterday I remembered that the house at one time was full of 68K machines (Amiga, Mac and Unix).

x86 and clones won the general CPU market. ARM owns the low power market.
   

Does anyone still "need" a 68k CPU?

No: 32-bits of addressing would only be useful for the embedded market, which is already owned by Atmel and ARM.

Yes: For legacy applications. EXTERNAL LINK restarted 68020 and 68040 production, and took over the Motorola/Freescale/NXP inventory.

Since these are intended as replacement parts, they run at legacy speed.

From the listed quantity 1,000 prices, the cheapest 68020 is $36. 68040s are nearly $200. They have two 68060s at over $800.

To scale it up to 3.4 GHz, the 68060 would cost you US$57,033.64!!!!!

  I N S A N E

(p.s. if you have a valid promo code, they'll give you a discount)

The architectural superiority of the 68k platform made it the best out there, let alone what the Apollo core has achieved atop that. If this were made into a stand alone processor (e.g. without the Amiga components) and further enhanced, I think there would be much interest from both the hobbyist and professional communities alike.

I, for one, would be interested in making a multiprocessor motherboard for such a chip.

Cool, what would you run on it?

I don't believe the architectural superiority matters much these days;  in many respects ARM's ISA is a lot cleaner than x86, but you can see that x86 just cannot get into small form factors like ARM can.  In addition, ARM is 'growing up' and chips like the latest Apple A10 have about the same performance per clock as the latest Intel Skylake/Kabylake (i7-6700K/i7-7700K) designs.  The Intel chips can clock 2x as high of course..

These companies have billions of dollars to throw around for R&D for these chip designs, Intel hid a lot of it's architecture issues starting back in 1995 with the Pentium Pro by translating x86 instructions internally to another instruction set and then executing that set. 

The final nail in the coffin is simple economies of scale -- a fast ARM chip can still be made very cheap vs. a 'new batch of 68K'.

Thus, The use case for 'advanced 68K' in 2017 and beyond is going to have to be:
- Retrofit of existing devices (i.e. industrial uses that still rely on 68K)
- Plug in replacement for defective 68K chips (arcades, legacy computer equipment, etc).
- Retrofit/Upgrade old 68K computers
- Nostalgic hobbyists (because the cost is never likely to be competitive with ARM, MIPs in IoT / small electronics).  - Think a few cool articles on Hackaday.

The largest potential $/volume market may be the industrial customers -- if there are any still out there that need 68K..

P.S.  I'd like to add that this achievement by the Apollo team is massive however; I don't imply to take any of that away.  Rearchitecting and enhancing a relatively advanced (albeit older) architecture is no small achievement. 

Software emulation runs into a bit of a cost/performance/exactness issue too - making it hard to compete against cheap ARM chips like the $35 rpi3.

Some other old devices that used 68000 or variants:
- Arcade machines (usually in addition to custom chips)
- Routers/Network equipment (although too old to be truly useful by today's standards)
- Printers (same deal)

A 68080 on Macintosh would be pretty cool though :)

But the point of using a 68080 has to be something else than just put it wherever there was a machine with a 68000 CPU.
The Jaguar for example does most of its heavy lifting with the custom chips and replacing the 68000 with a 68080 would only render the machine less usable.. The 3d functions, z-buffer, gourard shading was done by "Tom" graphics chip, not the CPU. So the slow 3d games would not get faster with a 68080.
Pretty much same argument for Sega Megadrive.. The Polygon pushing titles (like Virtua Racing) used custom chips in the cartridge to handle 3d ops (Samsung SSP160x 16-bit DSP to be precise))
Again, faster CPU would do nothing useful.

CD32.. Sure.. Its an Amiga.. But to make it useful you'd need a whole board with at least some FastMem.. soo basically a VampireCD32 ;-) (Or an adapter for custom CD32 connector to --> A1200 cards)

And of course, when the Vampire is viewed primarily as an accelerator, it's the limitations of the original architectures, operating systems and applications that come into play.

However, beyond emulation needs, the Vampire is effectively a modern replacement for these systems and offers far more potential.

It would be interesting to know how many people would opt for a standalone Vampire with that potential in mind.

When that list is posted, count me in as +1.

If the A1200 Reloaded ever sees the light of day we'll know if that idea is workable.

I'm really curious to see how well the standalone can emulate the legacy hardware. Doing that effectively would be a coup.

The Retro community is gaining more interest in efficient gaming.

Unfortunately its still hard for people to learn the basics of assembler.

This is because : They dont know which machine to use
They dont know which developer suite to use
Not enough good quality video tutorials eg youtube
No dedicated website for assembler techniques & game logic.

Here is a link to a SEGA game developer, trying to show how games are written in 68000 using Sega Hardware Developer system.

EXTERNAL LINK 

Amiga could lead for all things ASM and games.

How about this kind of page EXTERNAL LINK

Absolutely! lol