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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.
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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?
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.
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...
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.
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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
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)
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
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 of DirectX sort of killed that idea. - The P-III release was, at the time, something of a farce. There was almost no major core design improvements besides KNI, and clock-speed improvements were modest, at best. There was the whole "Internet Optimized" hype, which I've never heard justified. The most notorious item at the time of the release of the P-III was the addition of the on-chip serial number, which really seemed at the time to be more intended to play big brother and/or to let OS vendor's crack down on piracy than to provide "security" as it was hyped. I suspect if it wasn't for public recoil, that may have been the case. Somone asked about Celerons: 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. FSB speed, data bus bit size, floating point processor, reduced cache, and hacked down clock rates have all been used. The only time it was justified was with the 486SX where the high failure rate of 486DX chips in floating point unit and/or at higher clock speeds made the 486SX a necessary way of unloading failed chips. Speaking of that concept, I think a bunch of crappy XT clones used the 8088 instead of the 8086 for much of the same reason: the 88 had an 8 bit bus and the 86 had a 16 bit bus. Is that correct? One last thing, as far as what was originally going to be the P7 (by Intel's standards), they released the original P4 as a P6 generation chip to tide over until their 64-bit chip co-developed with HP came into realization. The "786" was supposed to be a 64 bit processor. Which brings up my question: even with 64bit Windows being more or less viable, it seems like Intel's 64 bit push has lost all of its steam, and HP has supposedly dropped out. What happened?
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!