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As a CPU buff, I ordered a back-issue of Microprocessor Report where they discussed the introduction of the Alpha in glowing terms. The radical chip architecture and speed-at-any-price mentality was new at the time, but quickly proved itself to be the superior chip design approach. For most of the 1990s, the Alpha was the fastest chip on the market in both integer and floating point operations.

Alpha was a Risc chip's risc chip. The IBM Power architecture has dozens of operations and permutations; the Alpha has a handful. This contributed not only to the Alpha's speed, but also to its insatiable demands for memory. DEC introduced a code-translator that allowed the Alpha to run x86-32 binaries at native speeds, but warned that memory requirements would grow substantially. The software never became cost effective.

But, towards the turn of the millennium, something strange happened: the Pentium Pro architecture (happily renamed PII and PIII) inched towards the lead in integer operations. The P4 actually surpassed the Alpha chips. Intel had, by then, hired away some of the Alpha designers and began to adopt its performance enhancing strategies. How could Intel catch up to the Alpha when Intel was burdened with an architecture as convoluted as x86?

Strangely, the x86 architecture can also be a benefit to chip design. Because x86 compresses commonly used instructions into tiny, awkward byte codes, the P4 generation of chips requires less memory and fewer cache misses - and the convoluted opcodes can be decoded quickly by the processor prior to dispatch. In the long run, Alpha's simplified instruction set proved to be less useful than machine-code x86 compatibility; and x86 chips are now little more than Alpha chips sitting behind an x86 instruction decoder. The Alpha design lives on in every CPU you buy, whether it be AMD or Intel.

For further reading, check out CPU performance numbers on http://www.spec.org and read the commentary on Microprocessor Report.

The Embedded Microprocessors section of the MicroDesign Resources website has much of the information your looking for... but in reverse. The website will tell you about all the popular chips for embedded applications. You might be able to find what your looking for by examining the information about each microprocessor. I suppose it is the hard way to go about it.

The Embedded Microprocessors section of the MicroDesign Resources website has much of the information your looking for... but in reverse. The website will tell you about all the popular chips for embedded applications. You might be able to find what your looking for by examining the information about each microprocessor. I suppose it is the hard way to go about it.

Four people are credited with designing the 4004: Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima.

There are evidently bad feelings between Faggin and Hoff because Faggin feels he did all of the real work, and Hoff got much of the credit. Many accounts do not give Shima any credit, only giving credit to the three Intel engineers (Shima was an engineer at Busicom, a Japanese calculator company at the time, and later became an Intel engineer).

Interview with Shima (extremely interesting and detailed)

Another interview with Shima

Interview with Hoff

An e-mail from Mazor, and nice pictures of the 4004

A really nice picture of the 4004

A picture of three of the engineers (no Shima) years later

A picture of all four engineers

Federico Faggin's initials on the 4004 -- the only initials on the chip

Motorola also annouced 1Ghz G4's, as planned. Coming to a Mac near you.

Check this out. (Scroll down to the middle of the "PC Processors" session.)

Pretty interesting for us PPC-heads....

Thanks for the info. :)

OT: Does anybody know of any good microprocessor mag/zine/web site like " Microprocessor Report " that doesn't cost like a billion bucks a month to subscribe to? I'm no engineer or expert, but I love reading this type of stuff (and happen to be broke ;).

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