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Technology

Great Moments in Microprocessor History 184

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-ain't-no-abacus dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The microprocessor changed the world: how did we get from the first 4-bit models in the 1970s to today's 64-bit multicore monsters? This article covers the history of the micro from the vacuum tube to today's dual-core multithreaded madnes."
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Great Moments in Microprocessor History More

Great Moments in Microprocessor History

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  • Performance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Monday December 27, 2004 @04:40PM (#11194549) Homepage Journal

    Wow, it is pretty amazing how far we have come in CPU technologies. My introduction to computing came in the form of the MOS 6502 chip in my Apple II plus computer with a whopping 64k of RAM and a disk drive ! and a handset modem which I then used to talk to people all over the world. Pretty cool stuff for a twelve year old back in 1982. For my uses at the time however, that CPU speed was plenty and I was not processor bound in any of the tasks I handed it. Later uses however, started pushing the limits of CPU's and my computational (and financial) expenditures increased significantly. I realized that for our uses, the MIPS folks had the right concept going and I ended up buying SGI machines for our work in molecular modeling and statistics at the time, but those systems were soooo expensive. For comparison however, I have kept a standard dataset for years that has become my benchmark of sorts and have run calculations on it with a number of systems I've owned. On my old Indigo and Mac Quadra 840av's and Pentium I systems, this dataset would run for about three days before finishing. Just for kicks, I ran the same calculation on my new G5 and I was astounded to see it finish almost as quickly as I could press the "run" button. The G5 from IBM is truly amazing and I can get this performance in a dual G5 system all for a cost 1/8th of my SGI Octane.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:33PM (#11194922)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Performance (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
      Was your dataset memory limited?

      I know the G5's are probably at least 15-30 times faster than the 68040's in the Quadra's but if it took 3 days on such a beast it would still take a few minutes to perhaps an hour on a G5. This is pure cpu time.

      The rest may be because your huge data now sits in the ram vs sitting in the hard drive.

      • This is almost certainly the case. Even though I had maxed out the RAM on my other systems (to the tune of thousands of $$'s at the time), having more memory certainly does help eliminate the problem of disk thrashing and memory swapping. On the Mac systems for small data-sets, I could enable a RAM disk which sped things up considerably, but for many data-sets, they were too large to fit within the available RAM space. Modern systems can contain much more memory space (8GB/desktop with the G5's) allowing

    • Re:Performance (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Alien Being ( 18488 ) *
      You're claiming a speedup factor of about 200000?

    • The 6502 isn't dead (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      According to this [cpu-world.com], there are a whole bunch of people making them. The latest generation I can find a link to is the 65C02, which I'm pretty sure is the same generation as was used in the BBC Microcomputer (circa 1984). However, I seem to remember seeing a 65I02 listed somewhere, but I can't find a link to it. :(

      ObTrivia: One of the earliest attempts to build a supercomputer cluster out of commodity parts used a matrix of over 1024 6502 processors in parallel. As I recall, it didn't get very far, but it wa

  • Intel Generations? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BTWR ( 540147 ) <americangibor3@yah o o . c om> on Monday December 27, 2004 @04:42PM (#11194565) Homepage Journal
    I asked this once before, but I'm still unclear... OK, so the 286, 386 and 486 were 3 separate generations of microprocessors. And since you can't trademark a number, and since companies like Cyrix were releasing their own PC-Compatable "486s," instead of releasing the next generation as the generic 586, they called it the trademarkable Pentium. Then came the Pentium Pro, Pentium Pro w/MMX (which is basically what the Pentium II was I believe), Pentium III and the current Pentium IV.

    My question is this: Are all of these "Pent"iums still of the "586" generation? If not, which of these were in the same generation? What is the "X86" generation equivilent of the most-recent Pentium IV that we are currently in? Anyone know?

    • Re:Intel Generations? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Gorffy ( 763399 )
      Pentium 4's are 686's. 8088, 8086, 286, 386, 486, 586 (original pentium - pentium 2[3?]) and 696's for the P4's

      • Re:Intel Generations? (Score:5, Informative)

        by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis.gmail@com> on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:16PM (#11194821) Homepage
        Wrong. the p2/3/4 and pm are "i686" class. The p2/3/m are improvements on each other with the same concept behind the core [e.g. set of ALU pipes, load/store pipes and float pipes, the # and functionality of the pipes is the huge diff].

        Aside from the addition of SSE [in P3] and SSE2 [in p4 and pm] the p2/p3/pm series run the same instructions. Which is the other reason why they are "i686" class.

        The pentium, ppro and pmmx are "586" class. Below that they're in their own classes e.g. 80486 => "486 class", etc...

        • Yep and the pentium pro's are really pentium 3's but with some limited 16-bit pipelines.

          But I can also see the controversy of the p4 since intel made it slow per clock cycle than the p3 with longer pipelines in order to overclock it more to make it "appear" faster to the dumb average joe conusmer who buys based on mhz speed.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
            Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • Ooops my mistake.

              The PentiumII's and III's are also very similiar too I may add. Just some extra cache and a newer set of mmx instructions were added to the pentiumIII if I recall.

              I agree with the other poster who said the names are more of a creation from the Intel marketing department.

    • The Pentium MMX, II and III were just beefed up iterations of the original Pentium (increased bus and clock speeds, smaller and smaller dye sizes, more extensions such as SSE, MMX, etc). One of the biggest jumps in processor technology was the transition of the i486 to the Pentium, as I understand it. The Pentium 4 is still based on a lot of the original Pentium architecture, but is by far the most innovative out of the Pentium line since the original. And that isn't even touching the innovations that AM

      • Re:In a nutshell... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @04:59PM (#11194694)
        The Pentium MMX, II and III were just beefed up iterations of the original Pentium (increased bus and clock speeds, smaller and smaller dye sizes, more extensions such as SSE, MMX, etc).

        Not true. The jump to the PII was a big one. The Pentium had dual integer execution units, and it was a big deal to manually reorder code in order to keep both units working. The PII was where cycle counting lost all meaning, as it included out of order execution, a huge bank of internal behind-the-scenes registers, register renaming--the works. That was the first of the super-complex modern processors in the x86 family tree.

        I'd like to know why you consider the P4 to be the most innovative of the Pentium line since the original?
        • I'd like to know why you consider the P4 to be the most innovative of the Pentium line since the original?

          It's because its NetBurst architecture makes for a faster internet browsing experience!

          *ducks*
        • The Pentium Pro was the first member of the generation that includes the Pentium II and Pentium III.

        • being pedantic (Score:3, Informative)

          by lingqi ( 577227 )
          Chronologically speaking, out of order execution was introduced in Pentium Pro and not Pentium II. Unless you count the inclusion of MMX instruction set a revolution, the evolution from P-Pro to PII was not very big.
          • The other fairly important "improvement" of the PII over the Pentium Pro was that the Pentium Pro was heavily optimized for 32-bit code. On a 200MHz PPro, if you ran 16-bit code, it was estimated that it ran equivalent to a 166MHz Pentium I. The PII basically "fixed" this problem, most likely because Intel realized that there was still a boat load of 16-bit code out there (look inside Win95/98/ME).
        • That in fact happened already with the Pentium Pro, not the PII. The PPro had the second level cache die in the same package as the CPU and was therefore difficult and expensive to manufacture, the PII is essentially the same, adding only MMX and putting the second level cache on a PCB together with the (packaged) CPU.

    • Re:Intel Generations? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @04:54PM (#11194664) Homepage Journal
      IIRC, Pentium was always just a brand name.

      Pentium Pro, II, III and M are all basically sixth generation IA32, they have more or less the same core architecture.

      I would suggest Pentium IV to be seventh generation. because of Netburst. It had its place but also had its drawbacks.

      AMD's K series seemed to be about a number high for a while, this is because of AMD's lackluster K5, which they had to buy Nexgen to compete, starting with K6 I think. K5 really didn't compare well with Pentium, K6 didn't compare well with the 6th generation IA series but rather the 5th generation. K7 compares well with the 6th generation. K8 looks to be the king of the x86 hill for the moment in terms of overall performance.

    • Re:Intel Generations? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mercuryresearch ( 680293 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:36PM (#11194940) Journal
      This is a surprisingly political issue (I should know, I count these things among other parts of my job, and hear back about it when something is in the wrong "slot.")

      Anyway, the usually accepted answers are 7th or 8th generation. There's some definitely blending of lines between the microarchitectures. So you had Pentium (586) and Pentium Pro, Pentium II did share quite a bit but were also fairly different (Pentium Pro, for example, was actually a multichip module.) P3 shared a bit as well, but P4 is clearly a totally different animal.

      So if you count 8086 as first generation, it's
      8086 - 1
      80286 - 2
      80386 - 3
      80486 - 4
      Pentium - 5
      Pentium Pro/PII/P3 - 6
      Pentium 4 - 7

      If you break it between Pro and PII/P3, then it's 8.

      The reason this is political is because AMD also has their generations, which were identical to Intel through about the Pentium time frame, but then became radically different microarchitecturally, so you have claims that company "A" is ahead of company "I" generationally. Then, throw Itanium into the counting, and you have to ask WTF generation it is.

      Realistically, there's quite a few more microarchitectural tweaks that go on during a given generation than usually are acknowledged, so the lines get blurred even further -- today's P4 is a fair bit different from the original P4. My opinion is the generational nomenclature has lost almost all meaning. For example, technically Pentium M shares a lot of commonality as Pentium 3, but there's been so many changes to fundamental peices of the architecture that it really qualifies as a new and different animal that in many ways is both ahead and behind P4 -- so calling it an eighth, nineth or sixth-generation CPU can all be argued.
      • ... if we define "generations" as "processor cores."

        Page 3 of Intel's pdf " The Microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 Processor [intel.com]" has a bar graph (Figure 2) that "shows the relative clock frequency of Intel's last six processor cores." According to Intel's graph, the last six cores are 286, 386, 486, P5, P6, and P4P.

        The core that Intel calls "P5" is obviously the Pentium and Pentium MMX. The "P6" core is the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium 3. The "P4P" core (Pentium 4 Processor) is the next core after P

    • Re:Intel Generations? (Score:5, Informative)

      by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:58PM (#11195111) Homepage
      My question is this: Are all of these "Pent"iums still of the "586" generation? If not, which of these were in the same generation? What is the "X86" generation equivilent of the most-recent Pentium IV that we are currently in? Anyone know?

      The first major redesign of the x86 chip after the 486 was the Pentium, and it was such a new design it garnered the "P5" moniker still used today. The Pentium went on to be produced at various speeds and, eventually, with MMX extensions (dubbed the Pentium MMX). The original Pentium ran at 60MHz. The fastest Pentium MMX ever made was (I think) 233MHz.

      The next major redesign came with the Pentium Pro, the first Intel "dual cavity" chip. The large L2 cache and CPU were in the same package (a useful novelty back them). Due to the major re-engineering over the Pentium/Pentium MMX, the Pentium Pro was dubbed the P6, representing the sixth generation of Intel x86 chips. The slowest Pentium Pro was (I think) 150MHz, with the fastest being (IIRC) 233MHz.

      Now is where it starts to get funny. The Pentium-II started at 166Mhz was a slightly-enhanced Pentium Pro with half-speed, off-chip cache in a Slot1 package. It was almost identical to the Pentium Pro, so identical that you could at once time buy "Pentium Pro Overdrive" chips to put in your P6 sockets, chips that were more or less socketed versions of the P-II. The P-III (or P-!!! according to Intel marketspeak) was merely a breathed-on P-II with full-speed (but smaller) cache. The P-III started to life as Slot1 but then went back to sockets. This culminated in the "Tualatin" P-III running at 1.4GHz

      The Pentium 4 (Intel can't seem to make up its mind about Roman numerals or not) was the first major redesign since the Pentium Pro, and should be called the P7. However, most people just refer to it as the P4. It was a radical departure from anything that had gone before, with huge emphasis on sky-high clock rates at the expense of Instructions Per Cycle (IPC). Intel called it NetBurst. Customers called it stupid back when the first P4's were slower than the P-III's they were supposed to replace. The P4 started at (I think) 1.2GHz. Today we have 3.6GHz P4's, but it's doubtful it will go much, if any, higher due to fabrication technology limitations.

      Finally, we have the Pentium-M, an odd hybrid of the P4 and the P-III. The P-M emphasized IPC instead of clock rate (the fastest one to date runs at 2.1GHz, the slowest at 1.2GHz) and is very comparable to AMD's Athlon XP line. The P-M would make a fantastic desktop processor because it's amazingly cool (30W operating, compared to 118W for the P4), but Intel thus far has not made it palatable for desktop consumption (high prices for chips and very few available motherboards).

      What's coming after the P4? Intel really isn't saying. Dual-core P4's are supposed to be on tap, but I suspect heat and power will keep it from getting very far. I'm betting the P-M will become a very important chip in the next year or so as Intel gets back to IPC and completely abandons the silly P4 "NetBurst" idea. Faster clock rates were good for a while but the idea was destined to burn out early. IPC is where it's at.
      • Where does Celeron fit into this?
        • Celeron is just a disabled version of the Pentium II, III, and 4 - with less cache and slower FSB.
        • Oops, I forgot the Celery!

          The Celeron first appears as a cut-down P-II with no cache at all. I believe it started to life at 200MHz, but I do recall it being an overclocking dream with no L2 cache holding it back. Most everyone was able to get it up to 400MHz with no problem at all. That was the last no-cache Celeron.

          Follow-on Celerons came with 128K L2 cache running at full CPU speed. The golden CPU of the day was the Celeron 300A. This baby could be overclocked to 450MHz without even trying hard an

      • The slowest Pentium Pro was (I think) 150MHz, with the fastest being (IIRC) 233MHz.

        The fastest PPro was 200MHz. Some boards would let you overclock them but I was never able to get mine stable at 233MHz.

        Now is where it starts to get funny. The Pentium-II started at 166Mhz was a slightly-enhanced Pentium Pro with half-speed, off-chip cache in a Slot1 package.

        The PII started at 233MHz, had twice the L1 cache (32KB) of the PPro, and MMX.

        It was almost identical to the Pentium Pro, so identical that you could a

        • The fastest PPro was 200MHz. Some boards would let you overclock them but I was never able to get mine stable at 233MHz.

          I did some quick googling when finding these numbers and you're right. The page I was referencing was an OC'd PPro.

          The PII started at 233MHz, had twice the L1 cache (32KB) of the PPro, and MMX.

          Again, I used Google to figure out how low these things went, googling for "Pentium-II 200" and lower until I couldn't find any more hits. I found 864 hits with "Pentium-II 166." Either a lo
          • Either a lot of people are (a) making typos or (b) underclocking their P-II's, it does exist.
            When you see this mentioned in software requirements, they are probably confusing a Pentium-MMX with a PII, since from the applications perspective they are identical. When you see this mentioned as a dual system (i.e. the Dual PII-166 System I see as a first hit) they have probably confused it with the PPro, which was sold in 150, 166, 180, and 200MHz variants.
      • Interesting that you should say that. I note that similar predictions (about the end of the rise in speed and a new focus on Power consumption) are being made by senior chip engineers. eg. the recent interview with the guy who designed the DEC Alpha, recently linked from Slashdot.

        I say it's interesting because we now also have Microsoft claiming that they are about to develop better network processing capabilities for their operating systems.

        It's not hard to see how these tie up. People buy new software o

    • Then came the Pentium Pro, Pentium Pro w/MMX (which is basically what the Pentium II was I believe)

      No. Not really... If you want to say the PPro became anything, it was the Xeon line. The PII was based on the same core, but there were big differences. The PIII was based on the same core as well, so a chip certainly can be seriously different while having the core in common.

      Are all of these "Pent"iums still of the "586" generation?

      No, the original Pentium was the last of the 586 processors. I guess

  • At a guess, 886. However, I've got no idea if the Pentium I/II/III/IV actually represent new types of architecture or are an arbitrary naming scheme for marekting purposes
    • 786. See http://users.erols.com/chare/586.htm [erols.com] and http://users.erols.com/chare/786.htm [erols.com] for more info.
    • From my certification days, I believe the following is true:

      286 was neat.
      386 had math emulation.
      486 was better than 386 ;)
      Pentium is basically the 586.
      Pentium Pro isn't supposed to be good at multimedia, it's supposed to be a math processor, chunking out numbers like crazy, a lot like todays xeons..
      Pentium II was the big one. MMX multimedia functions, out of order processing etc ..
      Pentium III/IV are leaps and bounds of improvements and innovations from the it's predesessors.

      Hope my

      • Re:886 (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:48PM (#11195039) Journal
        Not quite.

        8086 was a fairly average 16-bit chip (with the 8088 variant which had an 8-bit external bus being more popular). Also available as a separate chip was the 8087 maths coprocessor (FPU).

        80186 was basically an 8086 with a few other bits on die. Quite popular as a microcontroller in the telecommunications arena.

        (80)286 was a beefed up 8086 with some added bonuses. I believe support for paged and segmented memory addressing was added in this generation. The coolest thing about the 286 was the chip form factor (like a gold square, with the `pins' along the side). 80287 also avaliable.

        386 was the first IA32 chip. Added some horrible extensions to an already fairly horrible architecture. 387 also available. Not to worry though, everyone will be moving to i860 soon...

        486 added an FPU on die. Later the 486SX was introduced, without the FPU and an external FPU module was available (which was really just a 486DX which disabled the original CPU when you plugged it in). `Clock doubling' (running the CPU at twice and later three times the clock speed of the mother board was introduced in this generation. Early 486 chips, while slower on paper than the i860, performed significantly faster since it was very hard to generate optimal code for the i860 (remind anyone of the Itanium?) i860s found a home as graphics coprocessors in several workstations, including the high end NeXT Cubes (and if you think current Macs are expensive, this beast - from which modern Macs are a direct descendent - cost around $10,000).

        The Pentium was a pipelined superscalar chip. Out-of-order execution was the buzzword of the day. Out-of-order had another meaning for initial versions of this chip - in 1994 a bug in the FPU caused Intel to recall the lot of them in exchange for free replacements at a cost of around half a billion dollars.

        The Pentium Pro was a workstation chip. It had support for 2- and 4- way SMP configurations and had the level 2 cache in the same package (but not the same die). The Pentium Pro also added a hack which allowed the OS to address up to 64GB of RAM. Applications can also make use of more than 4GB of address space, but they must use special instructions to do this (standard pointers are still 32-bit). The Pentium Pro was targeted at users of Windows NT, since it did not handle 16-bit code as well as the Pentium (it was faster for pure 32-bit stuff though).

        The Pentium MMX was a slightly faster (around 10%) version of the original Pentium, which included a primitive vector unit. MMX was almost as hideous to code for as the rest of IA32, and lacked a number of important features.

        The Pentium II was a Pentium Pro with MMX. It came in a slot form-factor, unlike the Pentium Pro (which was a two-die chip). This made it cheaper to produce, since the cache and the core could be tested independently before assembling into a unit. By this stage, no one really cared about performance of 16-bit code.

        The Pentium III (or !!! as Intel liked to write it) was a variant of the Pentium II with a newer vector unit (KNI, later known as SSE). These chips `made the Internet faster' and were (allegedly) made by men in psychedelic bunny suits[1]. Later generations moved the level 2 cache on die and came in a socket form factor.

        The Pentium IV was a typical Intel project - hugely complicated and full of features that sounded so good on paper. The pipeline is so long that it can have around 200 instructions in-flight at once. This makes a branch prediction failure incredibly expensive. There are some novel features (as well as yet another attempt to produce a useful vector unit), such as the trace cache, which stores decoded micro-ops in non-branching blocks. The long pipeline meant that they could be clocked at insane speeds, unfortunately this did not convey a corresponding performance boost (as AMD and IBM have show).

        The Pentium M is a descendent of the Pentium III with a faster external bus and significantly better power management. Clock for clock (and watt for watt) it performs significantly better than the Pentium IV.

        [1] A bunny suit is the name given to the whole-body covering worn in clean rooms.

        • The 8086/88 had segments I am pretty sure the 286 implemented paged memory as well as segments pretty much making it a pigs breakfast. Yes the 286 kept 16 bit segment size so any data structure over 64k was a nightmare.

        • Re:886 (Score:2, Interesting)

          by tmika ( 843163 )
          A few points and items that people have missed, and a question: - An important feature of the Pentium II was that it had optimizations to run both 16-bit and 32-bit code with reasonable performance (at least according to Intel's marketing at the time). The PPro ran NT great, but was slower than a Pentium running 16 bit. At the time of release, this was still an issue. The MMX thing was at initially perceived as a cool for NT based 3D gaming crowd, but lack of driver support and then the ugly, early days
          • Celerons, the 486SX, the 386SX, and also AMD Durons are variations of the same, somewhat despicable marketing concept of taking a processor and crippling it in some way so you can sell it for less without devaluing the rest of your chips

            This is not entirely fair. The 386SX had a narrower external bus, making 386SX motherboards cheaper than 386DX ones. The original Celerons were PIIs who's cache failed testing. The Celeron A series only had half as much cache as the PII, making it cheaper to produce.

      • Respect to Intel (Score:5, Informative)

        by shani ( 1674 ) <shane@time-travellers.org> on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:58PM (#11195116) Homepage
        286 was neat.

        The 80286 was the first Intel CPU that had support for multitasking. By this, I mean that the processor would prevent programs from overwriting arbritrary memory locations. Plus several useful instructions to help this. And it could access more than 1 Mbyte of RAM (technically the 8086 and 8088 could do this, but only with cludges like EMS memory, which swapped memory into the accessible 1 Mbyte a page at a time, under direct control of the applications).

        386 had math emulation.

        This is a bit of an understatement, because the 80386 was the first 32-bit CPU from Intel. Also, it had support for running multiple "virtual" 8086 machines - fantastic stuff!

        In my mind, the 80386 is when the PC became a "real" computer.

        486 was better than 386 ;)

        True. The biggest innovation of the 80486, IMHO, was that it included the equivalent of the earlier math co-processors (which cost hundreds of dollars) on the CPU. All of the tricks I'd learned to do integer math became obsolete overnight - and I was glad!

        To be fair, the 80486 moved a lot of instructions that had been performed in microcode into hard-wired circuits. The majority of commonly-used instructions were now executed in one CPU cycle. In fact, with the 80486 a lot of earlier specialised instructions became obsolete.

        Pentium is basically the 586.

        The Pentium is, indeed, the 80586, but Intel was reacting to competitors making cheaper chips that implemented the same instruction set and selling them with the same name. The courts ruled that Intel couldn't trademark a number (486), so all future CPU's have names. Branding!

        The Pentium didn't add that much in terms of features, but it did support a kind of super-scalar processing (meaning running more than 1 instruction per CPU cycle), in a very cumbersome and strange way, with one "pipeline" that could execute a limited subset of instructions in parallel with the other, main pipeline. This is the beginning of the end for hand-crafted assembly code as a way of life.

        Pentium Pro isn't supposed to be good at multimedia, it's supposed to be a math processor, chunking out numbers like crazy, a lot like todays xeons..

        The Pentium Pro was the bomb! Your summary does a huge disservice to this CPU.

        The Pentium Pro was, in my mind, a work of genius. The folks at Intel did not ignore the results that the RISC folk were using. Instead they hit upon a way to get (most of) the advantages of RISC and maintain compatibility with the CISC instruction set. They broke the Intel instructions up into RISC-like instructions, and those were executed RISC-style by the processor, and then "retired" one CISC instruction at a time.

        As others have mentioned, this allowed out-of-order instructions, multiple execution cores, and all of the goodness that we still rely on today.

        Pentium II was the big one. MMX multimedia functions, out of order processing etc ..

        The Pentium II was just a Pentium Pro targeted at desktops rather than at servers. A good thing, mind you.

        Of course, MMX was added, but in the first MMX instructions only had a very limited set of applications, and MMX had already been present on some of the earlier Pentium models.

        Pentium III/IV are leaps and bounds of improvements and innovations from the it's predesessors.

        The Pentium III is not a big improvement over the Pentium II, or indeed over the Pentium Pro! The MMX (or rather SSE) was improved again, and gave compiler writers better control over cache behaviour, which did result in impressive gains in certain applications.

        The Pentium 4 is the first truly different architecture since the Pentium Pro - and Intel appears to be moving away from it towards the Pentium M-style chips (which are basically the Pentium Pro again, with emphasis on low power). The idea with the Pentium 4 was to have a very, very long pipeline to allow the processor to scale up to ridiculous speeds. It worked! But as Mac fanatics will be happy to tell you, processor performance is more than just high megahertz.

        Later Pentium 4's had hyper-threading, which is cool, and indeed a bit of a departure, and will be present on all desktops soon enough. Yay!

        • The biggest innovation of the 80486, IMHO, was that it included the equivalent of the earlier math co-processors
          Don't forget cache. It was only when the 486 showed up with its 8KB instruction cache that 386 vendors were motivated to start putting L2 cache on their boards. After that point, people started realizing just how much ass a cached machine could kick.

  • lightning rods (Score:5, Funny)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) * on Monday December 27, 2004 @04:45PM (#11194584) Homepage Journal
    Thus spake the article:

    ...the lightning rod, which was invented independently by two different people in two different places.

    I am guessing lightning rods have been around since people first created metal rods and stood out in fields during lightning storms. The hard part isn't making a lightning rod, but staying alive long enough to claim to be the inventor.

  • Great moments indeed (Score:4, Funny)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @04:56PM (#11194680) Homepage
    It appears the server was alive for mere moments before being slashdotted to death. With only 9 comments the site is completely dead.

  • IBM/PeeCee Bias (Score:5, Informative)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:00PM (#11194705) Journal
    That article has a great deal of IBM bias, as one might expect. Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present [sasktelwebsite.net] is a much more detailed, comprehensive and informative look at microprocessor history. It deals with some very strange and innovative designs that the IBM article doesn't mention.
    • Yes, it looks lie someone too the Great Microprocessors page and stripped out everything interesting and then added random factually-challenged commentary to pad it out.

      Like this:

      Where is the 68000 now?
      As the 68000 was reaching the end of its life, Motorola entered into the Apple-IBM-Motorola "AIM" alliance which would eventually produce the first PowerPC® chips. Motorola ceased production of the 68000 in 2000.

      The 68000 as a chip is no longer in production, but there are dozens of 68000-family pro
    • It's not the bias I mind -- as it comes from an IBM site you expect an IBM bias -- but the illiteracy of the writing.

      I don't know who "W.W. Warner freelance author" is, but I certainly wouldn't hire him for a professional writing engagement. The whole thing reads like a mid-level 3rd year CS student essay. Not the kind of article you expect IBM to put their name to.

      • What really amazes me is that these articles always get posted to /. I mean, how ofter do you get similar articles from HP, SGI, Cray, Sun etc. posted as headline news here? The Developers section is terrible for frequent half-witted, thinly disguised IBM marketing fluff posing as technical writing.

  • Excellent book on subject (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mariox19 ( 632969 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:01PM (#11194713)

    There's an excellent book on the subject, small and very readable, called The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution [amazon.com]. I read this last year and found it to be a good story.

  • Ahhh, MIPS v1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:05PM (#11194744) Homepage Journal
    What a great company. Too bad they were late with both the R6000 and the R4000 processors, back-to-back. That pretty much killed them, or drove them into SGI's arms (same thing). Don't know much about v2, but v1 was a damn fine place to work. The buildings on Arques in Sunnyvale also went on to house Crescendo (remember CDDI?), Cisco's first acquisition, and Mosaic/Netscape in it's early time.

  • Waiting for the next great leap (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:10PM (#11194781)
    The jump from the 6502 to the 68000 (a scant four years apart), was a huge one. Ditto for many of the x86 generations. But performance has leveled off quite obviously in the last few years. The difference between a 3GHz P4 and a 3.6GHz P4 is fairly small, as both tend to be memory bound for real-world applications. And at the same time the power consumption for the 3.6GHz has increased more than the performance.

    So what's going to be the next big leap for desktops and notebooks? 64-bit processors are here, yes, but all else remaining the same these run *slower* than 32-bit processors, because the cache effects of 64-bit pointers more than offsets the ability to do 64-bit integer math (note that the x86 FPU has been 80-bit since its inception). Dual core is nice...but it's only a win for multithreaded applications or when you're running multiple applications at the same time. Even then, the effect of multiple threads sharing a cache can result in lower performance than many people expect.

    Surely someone is going to set the PC world on its ear with a massive performance leap that doesn't require 1000 watt power supplies?
    • And at the same time the power consumption for the 3.6GHz has increased more than the performance.

      What you see here is just a proven technology that's being pushed to its limits: the perf gains will become smaller and smaller, while the drawbacks become bigger and bigger, until finally some other new technology replaces the current one (optical chips, massively parallel bio processors,...)

      Just look at calculators: I have a 1973 HP-45 here on my desk that sucks almost 500mW from its battery pack. That's h
    • The jump from the 6502 to the 68000 (a scant four years apart), was a huge one.

      Let's not forget the wonderful Motorola 6809 (introduced in 1977, two years before the 68000). At the time I was doing some work in PDP-11 assembly, and switching to 8080 assembly language was a nightmare of special use registers and un-orthogonal statements. Even the Z80 (though much better), suffered because of the need for compatibility with the horrible 8080. The 6809 was beautifully clean in comparison.

    • The jump from the 6502 to the 68000 (a scant four years apart), was a huge one. Ditto for many of the x86 generations. But performance has leveled off quite obviously in the last few years. The difference between a 3GHz P4 and a 3.6GHz P4 is fairly small, as both tend to be memory bound for real-world applications. And at the same time the power consumption for the 3.6GHz has increased more than the performance.

      Amen, brother.

      That's what I'm seeing for quite some time especially on the PC market. ZX81

      • A 'Great Leap Forward' is happening now in microcontroller chips. These are processors that have internal flash ROM for their programs and also have most of their peripherals on the controller itself instead of external chip sets.
        For example the Atmel AVR Tiny13 chip has four channels of 10-bit ADC, runs at 25 MIPS, and sells for 88 cents (each in 25 unit lots) on DigiKey. Other companies are introducing other chips that are impressive in different ways.
        The PC system may be peaking but the controlle

        • A 'Great Leap Forward' is happening now in microcontroller chips. These are processors that have internal flash ROM for their programs and also have most of their peripherals on the controller itself instead of external chip sets.

          This is not happening *now* but has been design criteria from the first microcontroller on... On-chip FlashROM and EEPROM were already introduced at least a decade ago when those techniques became dirt cheap and replaced common PROM and EPROM technologies.

          Agreed, AVR is dirt

    • I think the next great leap will come from parallelism.

      If you want better compute-per-watt, there are plenty of processors better than a monolithic x86 or x86-64 CPU; better even than POWER or PPC.

      The trick is tying them together efficiently. That will be solved either by efficient interconnect or economies of scale that simply overwhelm the inefficiency with vasly superior resources. This is already happening in supercomputing and there's a long tradition of features of supercomputing making their way do

    • Re:Waiting for the next great leap (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      64-bit processors are here, yes, but all else remaining the same these run *slower* than 32-bit processors, because the cache effects of 64-bit pointers more than offsets the ability to do 64-bit integer math (note that the x86 FPU has been 80-bit since its inception).

      True, but on the whole x86-64 is an improvement over x86-32 because of the increased number of registers, reducing the need to shuffle stuff from and to the main memory. Additionally, the integrated memory controller on the Athlon 64 CPUs he

    • 64-bit processors are here, yes, but all else remaining the same these run *slower* than 32-bit processors

      But all else HASN'T remained the same. The AMD64s have more registers, built-in memory controller, and plenty of other improvements that make it significantly faster than 32-bit x86 processors. In addition, Cool-n-Quiet (really more about the motherboard than processor) which reduces heat, something you seem superfically concerned with.

      The difference between a 3GHz P4 and a 3.6GHz P4 is fairly sm

      • But all else HASN'T remained the same. The AMD64s have more registers, built-in memory controller, and plenty of other improvements that make it significantly faster than 32-bit x86 processors.

        And the 64-bit aspect of it is irrelevant in that case. It's faster because it's a better CPU, not because it is 64-bit. 64-bit is good, yes, but not because it is inherently faster.
        • This conversation is getting stupid... The 64-bit CPUs have an improved architecture. What the hell difference does it make if one single specific feature is a speed improvement or not?
          • This conversation is getting stupid... The 64-bit CPUs have an improved architecture. What the hell difference does it make if one single specific feature is a speed improvement or not?

            Let's say that Toyota develops a new car that gets 100 miles per gallon. In that same model, they put in some impressively comfortable seats, the likes of which have never been seen before. Would you really talk about the amazing performance those seats give you?

            The point is that AMD could have put all the architectural

            • Let's say that Toyota develops a new car that gets 100 miles per gallon. In that same model, they put in some impressively comfortable seats, the likes of which have never been seen before. Would you really talk about the amazing performance those seats give you?

              That's the stupidest analogy I've ever heard. Here's a better one...

              Let's say GM makes a hybrid version of a normal car that is far more fuel effecient, and gets twice the mileage. Let's also say that they made this car a 4-door, instead of a 2-

    • The big leap comes outside the CPU. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MtViewGuy ( 197597 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @01:18AM (#11197563)
      Let's face it. CPU's have gotten so fast that they are essentially outrunning almost every other component on the computer itself.

      Fortunately, things are getting better. I can cite the following improvements in the last 4-5 years:

      1. Faster memory access. System RAM memory speeds has gone from running at 33/66 MHz for many years to today's DDR400 (PC3200) DDR-SDRAM, with even faster speeds coming over the next 18 months or so.

      2. Faster graphics cards. With AGP 8x and now PCI Express, graphics cards can process and display highly-complex 3-D graphics that would have been the realm of extremely expensive dedicated workstations just a few years ago.

      3. Faster disk access. Thanks to ATA-100/133 IDE, Serial ATA (and soon Serial ATA-II) IDE, and UltraSCSI 160/320 interfaces, not to mention hard drives with 7200 to 10,000 RPM spin speeds and 8-16 MB of hard drive memory cache, you can access data on a hard drive very quickly nowadays. Even optical drives have become quite fast thanks to these interfaces.

      4. Better motherboard designs. Motherboard interconnects have gotten quite a bit faster, thanks to much-improved chipset designs and the use of HyperTransport and similar technologies.

      5. Faster external data access. 100 mbps 100Base-T Ethernet connections are common on motherboards now, and some motherboards now even have 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet connections. External devices that used to connect to the computer through slow serial ports now connect through vastly faster USB and IEEE-1394 ports, fast enough that USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 connections can support the downloading of video data from digital camcorders!

  • Mirror (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    here's a mirror (site still works for me but other said its slashdotted.. posted a/c to prevent karma whoring) Great moments in microprocessor history
    The history of the micro from the vacuum tube to today's dual-core multithreaded madness

    Level: Introductory

    W. W. Warner [slashdot.org] (wade1warner@yahoo.com [mailto])
    Freelance author
    22 Dec 2004

    The evolution of the modern microprocessor is one of many surprising twists and turns. Who invented the first micro? Who had the first 32-bit single-chip design? You might be surprised

    • . . .

      "CADC spent 20 years in top-secret, cold-war-era mothballs until finally being declassified in 1998. Thus, even if it was the first, it has remained under most people's radar even today, and did not have a chance to influence other early microprocessor design."

      at first hearing that name i imagined a central air defence computer, but if you're interested in systems redundancy, this is way more interesting.

      it may have gone almost unheard of, but fortunately a few papers and descriptions are availab

  • Minor factual error in article... (Score:4, Informative)

    by LordByronStyrofoam ( 587954 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:22PM (#11194856)
    TI didn't make the TRS80, of course. That was Radio Shack.
    • Agreed. Shame Tandy missed out on its moment of glory here.

      Speaking of TI and "lack of historical attibution", how did the article authors miss out on the most important commercial application of the TMS-9900 CPU... the TI 99/4 micro? [wikipedia.org] That thing ROCKED. TI couldn't market the thing for crap, but it was awesome "back in the day". And they didn't do much to appease the l337 h@x0r contingent, either, with the closed and undocumented software architecture. But so much potential at a time when it had very little

  • Great article but doesn't mention the NexGen Nx586 (Score:5, Informative)

    by benzapp ( 464105 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:25PM (#11194878)
    Prior to the release of that processor, all Intel compatible CPU's essentially licensed Intel microcode.

    The Nx586 was a risc processor that translated Intel instructions into its native format. To this day, this is how all subsequent processors have functioned, including Intel processors starting with the Pentium II. The success of NexGen also spelled the death of the PowerPC breaking into the mainstream. There was no need to limit yourself to CISC's limitations when you could virtualize the whole architecture inside a RISC processor.

    In 1994, everyone complained about Intel's oppressive licensing and told us RISC processors would take over the world. Then came NexGen and they were wrong. What's funny is IBM manufactured most of the Nx586 processors...

  • Ahh, the memories (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ann Elk ( 668880 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:26PM (#11194881)

    My first experience with a "real" CPU was a RCA 1802-based Elf computer I built (from a kit) when I was 13. From the article:

    Where is it now?
    Sadly, the RCA chip was a spectacular market failure due to its slow clock cycle speed.

    The slow clock speed (and static CMOS design) were actually blessings in disguise. With a simple bit of hardware logic, you could stop the clock, and single-step the CPU at the clock-cycle level. In fact, this was the standard way to debug code on the Elf -- it had only a 16-key hex keyboard and two-digit hex display. Those were the days...

    • It was one of the only chips available with a version that was fabbed using Silicon-on-Sapphire, making it ideal for space applications that required radiation hardening.

  • A great moment: first one actually worked (Score:3, Informative)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:26PM (#11194885) Homepage
    How about when Federico Faggin [intel4004.com] first powered it up [www.uib.es].

  • Another footnote - the NatSemi SC/MP (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    National Semiconductor SC/MP, a.k.a. the "Scamp" [cpu-museum.com]:

    Simple-to-use Cost-effectiv MicroProcessor Silicon gate, P-channel Isoplanar LSI technology Designed to fill the gap between four-bit CPUs (4004, 4040) and eight-bit microprocessors, the SC/MP features a 12-bit address bus, interfacing directly to 4 K bytes of standard memory. +5 V and -7 V volts power supply. Providing CMOS compatibility.

    Disadvantage: SC/MP-II is much slower than CPUs in N-Channel MOS technology. The simplest instruction takes five micr

  • 68k evolution (Score:5, Interesting)

    by greywire ( 78262 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @05:48PM (#11195046) Homepage
    I can't believe they didnt mention the evolution of the 68000. It didnt just end at the 68060 (which isnt mentioned either) but evolved into the ColdFire chips and the DragonBall cpu's that were used in Palm PDA's until fairly recently.
  • I've always known the 8080 as being called the 8080A. Presumably this means that the chip was revisioned early in its lifetime. If that's so, what was the difference between the original 8080 and the 8080A?

    It also possessed a signal pin that allowed the stack to occupy a separate bank of memory.

    I never knew this. I did, however, recently find out about the undocumented instructions in the 8085 which Intel presumably disavowed all knowledge of so that they wouldn't have to add source-level compatiblity

  • Not inevitable (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @06:32PM (#11195381) Homepage Journal
    In truth, it does not matter who was first. As with the lightning rod, the light bulb, radio -- and so many other innovations before and after -- it suffices to say it was in the aether, it was inevitable, its time was come.

    These things aren't at all inevitable.

    First, the 20 year delay between Lilienfeld and the realization of the transistor should be evidence alone of the fact that something more than "the inevitable" was going on with the transistor. Additional evidence is that the inventors of the transistor did their work against orders from Bell Labs management to stop work [geocities.com]. they actually had to hide their work on a roller-cart which they hid in a closet until their management was gone when they would roll it out and continue their work. It could easily have been 20 more years -- or more -- if they hadn't risked their jobs to do what Bell Labs management tried to stop them from doing.

    Secondly, all you need to do to observer that "ripe" technological advances are not inevitable is just look at what NASA has done to kill the spirit of enterprise in launch vehicles for the last 30 years or more. You can kill almost any technology by simply creating a government bureaucracy chartered to develop it which continues to get money to "solve" the problem so long as the problem remains unsolved. They'll have billions per year to make sure it never happens -- and when it comes to lowering the price per lb to low earth orbit they have succeeded in that task beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

  • Embedded Processors (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @06:35PM (#11195411) Homepage
    It's interesting how old chip designs don't disappear, they often survive in other forms. Looking at my calculator collection, I can find examples of the 6502, ARM, Z-80 and 68000 being used as the core CPU in modern products.

    Then there are the uncounted numbers of anonymous microcontrollers in just about everything you can think of. How many are in your PC, let alone your entire house and car?

    • They're popular in part because engineers know how to program them based on previous experience. It's nice to have some background on the ins and outs of a new CPU before you start designing stuff for it.

      Then again, backwards compatibility of code that's already compiled is what keeps the x86 architecture thriving.

  • Not Enough Research (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @08:21PM (#11196168) Homepage Journal
    This article gave extremely short shrift to one of the, if not the, most powerful 8-bit micros ever made; the motorola 6809. This was a revolutionary -- not evolutionary -- micro. Multiple stacks, highly orthogonal, broad and powerful indexing capabilities... while it had roots in the 6800, it no more resembled the 6800 than does a Lamborghini Countach resemble a Volkswagon Golf.

  • This is an excellent article, it's nice to see some processor history that's not dominated/biased by x86 content; good to hear about some of the underdogs and where they are now. These are all the things I wondered about as I looked at processor timelines in the not-so-informative text books through high school and college; every single book hyped Intel as the sole creator of every single processor innovation. The truth is that Intel was very innovative in the beginning, then slowly became fat and MHz-m
  • The part about TI is interesting...

    The TI TMS 9900 had a strong beginning, but was packaged in a large (for the time) ceramic 64-pin package which pushed the cost out of range compared with the much cheaper 8-bit Intel 8080 and 8085. In March 1982, TI decided to start ramping down TMS 9900 production, and go into the DSP business instead. TI is still in the chip business today, and in 2004 it came out with a nifty TV tuner chip for cell phones.

    Completely glosses over their involvement and production of
  • Does anybody have any more information on the MicroFlame? I'd appreciate some gory details on just how hot it ran.

  • Correction to article (Score:2, Informative)

    by vandan ( 151516 )
    The Commodore 64 had a 6510 CPU, not a 6502.
    The Commodore VIC-20 had a 6502 processor, and while they looked similar on the outside ( of the computer ), they were incredibly different in performance and capability. The 6510 was a BIG step forwards.

  • Interesting article but... It omits all mention of the contributions from outside of the USA.

    In particular, there is no mention at all of the development of the ARM processor, or even the Japanese microprocessors. NEC made higher-performance pin-compatible clones of the 8088/8086, the V20/30 chips... a early way of improving performance of early PCs was to remove the Intel chip and slot in a NEC.

    But it is the lack of mention for the ARM I think is particularly alarming, given that the ARM is perhaps the m
    • Erm, it DOES mention the ARM and gives it the title of probably the most successful CPU architecture ever. It notes the roots of ARM from the Acorn computer company, including the fate of Acorn (bought by Olivetti, and now owned by Broadcom).
  • Many processors were left out of the article. (Can't say that's bad, there are so many.) One notable device out of the mainstream was the SMS300, also known as the Signetics 8X300. This was a bipolar micro, running at 3 MHz clock in 1980, but with a high instruction rate. Merge and rotate in a single instruction. Signetics got bought out by Phillips.

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