The Motorola 96XXX is a family of digital signal processor

Digital signal processor

A digital signal processor is a specialized microprocessor with an architecture optimized for the fast operational needs of digital signal processing.-Typical characteristics:...

 (DSP) chip

Integrated circuit

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...

s produced by Motorola

Motorola

Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...

. They are based on the earlier Motorola 56000

Motorola 56000

The Motorola DSP56000 is a family of digital signal processor chips produced by Motorola Semiconductor starting in the 1980s and is still being produced in more advanced models in the 2000s. The 56k series was quite popular for a time in a number of computers, including the NeXT, Atari Falcon,...

 and remain software compatible with them, but have been updated to a full single-precision (32-bit) floating point

Floating point

In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...

 implementation.

Many of the design features of the 96000 remain similar to the 56000. Where the 56K grouped two 24-bit data and one 8-bit extension register

Processor register

In computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available as part of a CPU or other digital processor. Such registers are addressed by mechanisms other than main memory and can be accessed more quickly...

 into a single 56-bit accumulator

Accumulator (computing)

In a computer's central processing unit , an accumulator is a register in which intermediate arithmetic and logic results are stored. Without a register like an accumulator, it would be necessary to write the result of each calculation to main memory, perhaps only to be read right back again for...

, the 96K groups three 32-bit registers into a 96-bit accumulator.

Unlike the 56K, the 96000 "family" consisted of a single model, the 96002. It was nowhere near as successful as the 56K, and was only produced for a short period of time. Today its role is filled by products based on the StarCore.