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Great Moments in Microprocessor History
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."
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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?
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
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
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.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
...Hence proving Moore's Law...
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 AMD (and yes in their time, Cyrix) contributed.
Yeah, who could withstand the 1.21 jigowatts?
It appears the server was alive for mere moments before being slashdotted to death. With only 9 comments the site is completely dead.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Sorry. Penguin was a bad choice. I should have said Bill Gates.
That article has a great deal of IBM bias, as one might expect. Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present 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.
Stick Men
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 . I read this last year and found it to be a good story.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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?
The history of the micro from the vacuum tube to today's dual-core multithreaded madness
Level: Introductory
W. W. Warner (wade1warner@yahoo.com)
Freelance author
22 Dec 2004
At the dawn of the 19th century, Benjamin Franklin's discovery of the principles of electricity were still fairly new, and practical applications of his discoveries were few -- the most notable exception being the lightning rod, which was invented independently by two different people in two different places. Independent contemporaneous (and not so contemporaneous) discovery would remain a recurring theme in electronics.
So it was with the invention of the vacuum tube -- invented by Fleming, who was investigating the Effect named for and discovered by Edison; it was refined four years later by de Forest (but is now rumored to have been invented 20 years prior by Tesla). So it was with the transistor: Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen were awarded the Nobel Prize for turning de Forest's triode into a solid state device -- but they were not awarded a patent, because of 20-year-prior art by Lilienfeld. So it was with the integrated circuit (or IC) for which Jack Kilby was awarded a Nobel Prize, but which was contemporaneously developed by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor (who got the patent). And so it was, indeed, with the microprocessor.
Before the flood: The 1960s
Just a scant few years after the first laboratory integrated circuits, Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (although at almost the same time as one from Texas Instruments).
Already at the start of the decade, process that would last until the present day was available: commercial ICs made in the planar process were available from both Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments by 1961, and TTL (transistor-transistor logic) circuits appeared commercially in 1962. By 1968, CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) hit the market. There is no doubt but that technology, design, and process were rapidly evolving.
Observing this trend, Fairchild Semiconductor's director of Research & Development Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that the density of elements in ICs was doubling annually, and predicted that the trend would continue for the next ten years. With certain amendments, this came to be known as Moore's Law.
The first ICs contained just a few transistors per wafer; by the dawn of the 1970s, production techniques allowed for thousands of transistors per wafer. It was only a matter of time before someone would use this capacity to put an entire computer on a chip, and several someones, indeed, did just that.
Development explosion: The 1970s
The idea of a computer on a single chip had been described in the literature as far back as 1952 (see Resources), and more articles like this began to appear as the 1970s dawned. Finally, process had caught up to thinking, and the computer on a chip was made possible. The air was electric with the possibility.
Once the feat had been established, the rest of the decade saw a proliferation of companies old and new getting into the semiconductor business, as well as the first personal computers, the first arcade games, and even the first home video game systems -- thus spreading consumer contact with electronics, and
You said: "This article covers the history of the micro from the vacuum tube to today's dual-core multithreaded madnes."
What does this have to do with a pissed off 8-bit
Nintendo Entertainment System (madNES)?
TI didn't make the TRS80, of course. That was Radio Shack.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
Look at IBM making jabs at Intel in this article:
:p
Well, of course, AMD is still standing. In fact, its latest designs are being cloned by Intel!
Which is probably talking about the AMD64 extensions.
Ouch
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...
I don't read or respond to AC posts
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:
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...
frosty piss
More like lukewarm piss.
How about when Federico Faggin first powered it up.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The first responder says this isn't so, BUT,
if it is, then THANK GOD for those sweatshops!
I've got two Athlon 64 3000+ systems, and without
those sweaty people, I'd be sitting here
looking at the wall!
Seriously though, I saw NO sweat on the chip
when I built my desktop unit. There may have
been sweat on the notebook processor, but I
can't say for sure.
You mean Texas and Germany are 3rd world nations?
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.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
...at some of the omissions from the Unix workstation heyday of the late 80's and early 90's. As a former member of the giant tribe of the "Intergraph Nation", I would have liked to have seen metion of the Clipper (the RISC processor originated at Fairchild, not the silly Clinton-era encryption thingie), also of HP's processor offerings prior to their dalliance with Intel on the Itanium.
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!
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 for them to the 8086 design.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I'd love to see the comparison between this advancement, and the changes made in computer interface design.
It seems to me that we had rapid advancement in the earlier years until the Microsoft monoculture struck. From that point it seems we only have small incremental changes, or steps backward in many ways.
Anyone seen a good timeline for UI design?
-Z
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. 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.
Seastead this.
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?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 was probably the earliest attempt at what would be called a Beowulf-style cluster today.
Personally, I'd like to see some cheapo microprocessor in modern CD and DVD drives. Have the decoding offloaded onto the drive itself. (The Commodore PET did this via the IEEE 488 bus, in the late 1970s, You could copy one disk to another, or print a file from disk, without ever having to use the central processor.)
CPU design is fascinating, as there have been so many potentially amazing designs (such as the T400 Transputer) whose ideas were revoltionary for the time but have slowly been adopted by mainstream manufacturers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Though I like computer history as much as anyone, the thing that annoys me the most is how people that write this stuff can't resist using the word "whopping" for EVERYTHING!!! Even if whatever it is you are reviewing was "whopping" at the time, it isn't now.
By the same token, I would not refer to a desktop computer with 4 gigs of RAM as a "whopping" amount either, because in a few years it will be common.
I move that we ban the word "whopping"!!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
. . .
/. ! :-)
.
"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 available linked below. Was news to me too. OMG I learned something on
http://www.microcomputerhistory.com/f14paper.htm
hmm, this all fits nicely with the recent article on the Apollo Guidance Computer . .
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-marketing driven, then had a chance to redeem themselves, and learn great lessons from the engineers acquired from the DEC Alpha team, but cranked out the piece of crap Itanic instead.
We do owe Intel for the proliferation of the PC, and the Centrino and Pentium M are good technology, but now they have to copy pages from AMD's book to bring 64 bit to the mainstream, just like they did back with the superscalar Pentium and Pentium Pro. The P4, though competitive, and good enough for most folks, is not so great technology compared to what AMD and the various PowerPC processors have. It's sad how marketing forces drive the industry more than value, speed (not MHz but instructions per clock), and power/thermal advantages. The Celeron derivative of the P4 is udder crap though, the P4's performance is heavily dependent upon lot's of cache, which the Celeron does not have enough of.
grep -iw skynet
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 SPARC chips for Sun. SPARC is relegated to a footnote of IBM's POWER architecture, and that now Sun is outsourcing SPARC to Fujitsu. Nevermind, of course, that Sun never produced SPARC chips in the first place.
Let's not just leave it to IBM to write the annals of microprocessor history, shall we?
Page 3 of Intel's pdf "The Microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 Processor" 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 P6.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Does anybody have any more information on the MicroFlame? I'd appreciate some gory details on just how hot it ran.
you had me at #!
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...
Nah, they were right. RISC processors did take over the world - in disguise.
Products
you had me at #!
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.
back in the 80s, all Intel Handbooks filled most of their pages with an arcane uP called the iAPX-432, calling it a mainframe.m puting/intel /iapx432/
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retroco
anybody in here remembers this?
The purpose of all philosophers was to impress women
An excellent list of processors that have appeared in the past is at: http://www.microprocessor.sscc.ru/great/ This is a mirror of another location which no longer exists (as far as I know). The list was mirrored in 1998, so it doesn't cover more recent microprocessors, however it does a good job of covering processors from before 1998 (including a few very rarely listed processors).
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!
You're absolutely right. The path chosen by the current chipmakers is something like pushing for an ultra-fast SUV, which will hold 8 people.
They push for higher revs, more horsepower, killer 0-60 times.
This SUV keeps racing back and forth across a single-lane bridge, and all the while there are a few dozen ferries slowly chugging across the bay carrying 200-500 persons each.
Build those ferries, Intel!
The only difference between 6502 an 6510 was a bidirectional I/O port, used in C64 to switch memory banks and drive the Datasette. The 1541 floppy drive also had a 6502 and it ran at exactly the same speed. That fact was exploited by bus accelerators e.g. in GEOS to transmit data without handshake.
Actually the 6502 in the VIC20 was clocked a bit higher but the C64 had much improved video and audio chips, maybe that's what you're talking about?
More advanced CPUs only appeared in C64DX/C65 prototypes and I recall an extension card featuring the 65816, with new opcodes, a 16 bit mode, and it was able to execute 6502 code at 4 MHz.
I suggest you watching "Triumph of Nerds - History of Personal Computers", a good history of the birth of computers and softwares. I suppose it was broadcasted some years ago in the US, but u can find it in DVD or visit the site that has a complete transcript of the show
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 most successful micro after the Z80.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
thanks.
does anyone have links to up to date pictures?
(64-Bit processors, would be nice)?
I only got: http://tinyurl.com/4lck8/
TIA matze
I read somewhere that an 1802 was used in the Voyager spacecraft that has now left the Solar System.
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.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I was working at Victor Canada when it came out - and our American Ceo sued the Jackson Five Victory Tour for infringing on our name....
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
The 68010 was created entirely with these features just so modern OSs would work. It was like a service patch for hardware...
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
Intel would not be where they are today if it weren't for Datapoint's technology.
I didn't know Texas was a nation.. though they probably should be!!
mods on crack can't even mod something 'troll' they mod it 'offtopic' stop smoking crack I metamoded your offtopic as 'unfair' because IT WAS THE WRONG MODERATION