What's so special about the 68000?

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Why is the 65816 being discussed when the topic is about the Motorola 68000? The 65816 and the 68000 are two completely different chipsets with completely different instruction sets.

Forgive me for offering a slight correction on that but the real reason why the Amiga was more expensive than the PC back in the day was first and foremost, it was loaded with tons of custom chips and non-standard circuitry that were researched for years in that decade.

The blokes who'd left Atari to embrace their own company, and which by the early eighties would have sold their research to Commodore, had no idea at first that they would be envisioning a multimedia computer. They designed the Amiga as a games machine - an arcade even. They were more concerned with "delivering their vision" rather than its price.

Now back into the original subject. The 68000 was way more powerful than the 8088. It had a huge flat 16MB memory addressing model as opposed to the Intel paged-memory constrained to meagre 1MB, it was a 32/16 bit hybrid technology as opposed to 8088's 16/8, plus a truck load of other features. Problem was, the 8088 was going for $3 while the 68k went for $25.

So the engineers back in those days had a choice between delivering the end-user either a more powerful computer or a more affordable one. Even if the end price wouldn't depend solely on the CPU it sure weighs in the decision.

Because the 68000 powered the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, and a variant of the 65816 powered the SNES, its main competitor. It's long been argued that the Genesis was the more powerful console of the two, but the OP is trying to provide a counterpoint. This is really a Genesis vs. SNES thread.

Well... I'm thinking along the lines of a general purpose computer (Macintosh, Atari ST, Amiga, Tandy 6000 vs. Apple IIGS). The 68000, as I said earlier in this thread, was closer to the DEC VAX minicomputer processors, while the 65816 (to me) is an extended version of the MOSFET 6502 found in the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64 and the Atari 400 and 800.

I was just stating what this thread is really about.