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."

Comments

Performance

[BWJones]

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.

Intel Generations?

[BTWR]

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?

[mercuryresearch]

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.

Excellent book on subject

[mariox19]

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.

Ahh, the memories

[Ann Elk]

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...

68k evolution

[greywire]

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.

Not inevitable

[Baldrson]

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. 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

[Detritus]

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?

The big leap comes outside the CPU.

[MtViewGuy]

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!