First making its name compilers and programming tools for the
Motorola 680x0 chip, Metrowerks went on to dominate the Apple Macintosh programming market from the launch of the first PowerPC-based machines.
It is true that graphics productivity will run much faster on Macintosh systems that use PowerPC processors than they do now on personal computers that use
Motorola 680x0 or Intel 486 chips.
Other microprocessors supported by the lab include the
Motorola 680x0 series, the Texas Instruments TMS320Cx5 DSP series, and the Intel 8096 series.
An ABI is written separately for each processor arthitecture (like the Intel 80386 or
Motorola 680X0, for example) and allows software developers to create applications that run on all computers based on the same microprocessor.