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Microchips That Shook the World
wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on '25 Microchips That Shook the World,' including such classics as the Signetics NE555 Timer, MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (Apple II, Commodore PET and the brain of Bender) and the Intel 8088 Microprocessor. Quoting: 'Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology clichés to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living.'"
PRINT ARTICLE (instead of the 5 separate pages):
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/8747
The 25:
1 - Signetics NE555 Timer (1971)
2 - Texas Instruments TMC0281 Speech Synthesizer (1978)
3 - MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (1975)
4 - Texas Instruments TMS32010 Digital Signal Processor (1983)
5 - Microchip Technology PIC 16C84 Microcontroller (1993)
6 - Fairchild Semiconductor A741 Op-Amp (1968)
7 - Intersil ICL8038 Waveform Generator (circa 1983*)
8 - Western Digital WD1402A UART (1971)
9 - Acorn Computers ARM1 Processor (1985)
10 - Kodak KAF-1300 Image Sensor (1986)
11 - IBM Deep Blue 2 Chess Chip (1997)
12 - Transmeta Corp. Crusoe Processor (2000)
13 - Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror Device (1987)
14 - Intel 8088 Microprocessor (1979)
15 - Micronas Semiconductor MAS3507 MP3 Decoder (1997)
16 - Mostek MK4096 4-Kilobit DRAM (1973)
17 - Xilinx XC2064 FPGA (1985)
18 - Zilog Z80 Microprocessor (1976)
19 - Sun Microsystems SPARC Processor (1987)
20 - Tripath Technology TA2020 AudioAmplifier (1998)
21 - Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set (1994)
22 - Motorola MC68000 Microprocessor (1979)
23 - Chips & Technologies AT Chip Set (1985)
24 - Computer Cowboys Sh-Boom Processor (1988)
25 - Toshiba NAND Flash Memory (1989)
( mod me up so some karmawhore will find themselves FAIL'd )
Even as a modern EE/robotics guy I use some of those parts today (555 timers in particular). I can't imagine the pain you'd have to go to to do some of the things they were used for in their heyday with discrete transistors and passive components.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
If the 6502 was good enough for Bender, why did they bother with anything else?
No 386? Protected Mode FTW
so they needed an upgrade?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
*fap* *fap* *fap*
Agree totally about the 555 but what? No 741 (Op Amp) or 7400 (or any other TTL?) ? Those were the staples of most electronic projects as kits or in magazines etc.
I know reading the FA is frowned upon on slashdot, but if you did, you could find the 741 as number 6.
The 741 is number 6 on the list.
How can you list the PET but not the C64 as an application of the MOS 6502?
Yeah, the 741 is there (though I reckon it should be #2, or even #1 - you know you can make a 555-equivalent suitable for most purposes with a couple of 741's and some clever circuit design, right? ;-).
But yeah, the lack of 7400 series (the original TTL versions, not that 74xxC crap ;-) is odd. Definately should be up there ~ #3 or higher. That stuff was the building blocks of computers before dedicated CPUs.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Interestingly enough, when Bill Mensch and company designed the 6501 (and later lawsuit modified 6502), they purposely made it very easy to expand it for future use. Although the chip was original designed for use in embedded solutions, several reports suggest that Bill Mensch, as well as fellow designer Chuck Peddle, saw the possibilities of the personal computer. This was around the time that the Altair 8800 was just released.
Bill Mensch attempted to push Commodore for features that might be useful for a personal computer. However, Commodore management rebuffed him. Supposedly frustrated that Commodore management was as short sighted as the Motorola management that he had fled from just a few years earlier, Bill Mensch went on to start his own company designing successors to the 6502.
Over at Western Design Center, Mensch and his sister designed the WDC 65C02, a bugfixed and enhanced version of the MOS 6502, that found its way into the Apple IIc and "enhanced" IIe. They also designed the WDC 65816, an extremely feature enhanced version of the 65C02 that included 16-bit index registers, 24-bit addressing, movable stack and zero page locations, and a host of new ops that allowed for jump tables and position independent code (useful with multitasking OSes and shared libraries).
Just imagine if Commodore had the 65816 in 1980 and released a 16-bit successor to the PET that could handle up to 16MB without the weirdness of bank swapping or segmentation. It would have been very popular with programmers. Smoking the "what if" crack pipe even more, imagine if they ported TRIPOS to the 65816. :)
Too bad they probably would have ruined it by bundling it with a chicklet keyboard.
FTFA:
Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit...Intel's 8088
Wrong. The 8088 was a technical nightmare with a crappy architecture . It just got lucky. IBM's justifiable preference was Motorola's infinitely superior 68000. Unfortunately, the 68000 was 9 months to a year away form production and the 8088 was in production 'now'. IBM felt that it had do it 'now' or miss the market window, so they (reluctantly) went with the 8088. A combination of perfect timing, luck, great marketing form IBM and Intel then and superb marketing strategy from Intel (the best selling sow's ear ever) sealed its place in history as a marketing success, but by no means a technical marvel.
It was nothing special at all and it definitely didn't shake the world. It didn't lead to a bunch of devices using it and it didn't lead to a new path for computing
The presence of this chip on here makes no sense to me.
Oh wait, I just got to where they talk about a Micronas MP3 decoding chip. So I guess this list is a little hit or miss.
I could hardly agree more with the Chips & Technologies AT chipset being on this list. It may have been more important to the success of the 8088 than the 8088 itself was. All of a sudden making a PC clone was easy, and inevitably it became the standard, so standard that now even Macs use the PC architecture.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
What's amazing to me is how the op-amps have been improved. I checked out of analog chips for about 25 years, then had occasion to use them. LM258 -- runs on 3 to 32 volts, rail-to-rail inputs and outputs, uses a whole milliamp to run.
Or the LMC6462 -- 3 to 15 volts, rail-to-rail in and out, 50 microamps supply, and an input resistance of 10 TeraOhms.
Maybe the wanted some more fuel efficient chips?
Seriously! How many of us learned assembly with a 68k? How many are in service today. It's like the Mini/Beetle/Model T of the chip world: cheap, simple and with a practically cosmopolitan distribution.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Too awkward to compose a URL at the moment, but if you're a pro or more-advanced hobbyist you should google the 555 chip's designer, Hans Camendzind . He released a nifty book on basic analog IC design that never got the attention it deserved IMHO. I believe it's downloadable as a PDF from his site.
The 8088 is a twisted, flawed architecture.
In true QWERTY fashion, it got a lock on the market by solving an immediate problem: the need to get beyond a 16-bit address space in a single-chip microprocessor. We are hamstrung by its limitations to this day.
See
Limitations of the IBM PC Architecture
or
The Curse of Segments
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/pc.html
The 80386 along with the C&T chipset ignited the IBM PC clone industry.
grumble grumble
Yeah, the 741 is there (though I reckon it should be #2, or even #1
They aren't ranked, so the numbers don't mean anything. It's just a list of 25 chips in no particular order.
I remember when the Apple G4 and G5 were not allowed in some countries because they were considered "supercomputers". I think that qualifies as "shaking the world".
OK, not a chip but a chip family - but surely one that, perhaps even more than the 7400 series, influenced an entire generation of engineers and circuit designs. It really was the first major series that allowed you to pretty much bolt together designs, lego-fashion, from building blocks without really worrying about interfacing too much. In comparison the 7400 series was much fussier with limited fanout and fan-in, and a fixed 5v supply. CMOS was BASIC to the 7400's COBOL.
LIke the ix432 ( check my nick.. you will understand ), AMD 29xx. Video chip sets too, like the ET4000 which brought 'accelerated vga' to the masses. Eproms.. .
That is the problem with any list, its YOUR list.
But i agree with most of it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I wrote an operating system and hardware drivers for a Z80 based embedded system in 1986. It was and still is a great processor as long as you only need 8 bits.
Chips usually have a short manufacture life. It's amazing the 555 timer is still in use, even after 556 (two 555 in one chip).
For example, the video chips that launched a revolution. From SGI's original graphics accelerators through the Amiga's "fat agnes" to the early nVidia and ATI cards.
But I do admit I like the fact they included the 555 and 701. Such fond memories breadboarding with those things...
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
For as groundbreaking that the ARM processor series, it was beat to the punch by DARPA. Not only did they help give us the Internet, they also helped with the evolution of chips that power your PDAs and smart phones that use the Internet.
Now for a trip back in time... supposedly during the late 1970s, processor design was starting to hit the limits of manual design. These were still the days of designing a microprocessor on paper. The military, a huge consumer of microchips at the time, decided to sponsor research into the creation of standardized processes for microprocessor design. The result was DARPA's VLSI Project. Standford, UNC/Chapel Hill, Berkeley and others were involved.
Numerous products and organizations came out of the VLSI Project. The BSD fork of AT&T's System-V saw major use and evolution. Networked CAD systems matured, specifically using the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, which was commercialized by Sun Microsystems.
Most relevant to the article, though, was the advancement of the "RISC" design. During the 1970s, researchers noted that highly orthogonal processors (where every type of operation, such as ADD, SUB, SHIFT, XOR, etc..., can be used with any kind of memory operator, such as direct, indirect, indexed, etc...) were somewhat wasteful. The vast majority of operations were rarely used. If you restricted those operations to register-only ops, you could really simplify the processor.
RISC architectures are less memory efficient than CISC architectures, something that was important in the 1970s, a time when dinosaurs roamed and 4KB Altairs roamed the world. They are also more tedious to program using assembly languages, also an issue during the 1970s when higher-level language compilers were rather unoptimized. However, by the time that the VLSI Project came around, these limitations were going away.
Since RISC processors are so much easier to design than CISC processors, researchers used their groovy new tools to design one. So in 1982, the DARPA RISC-1 was born, which had less than half the number of transistors as the Motorola 68000. It also ran circles around the 68000. A year later, the RISC-II was released. It was three times as fast as its predecessor.
The RISC design was also a huge advancement for researchers over at Standford. John Hennessy over there was trying to design a new processor that exploited the concept of pipelining. The problem, however, is that CISC instructions have variable (and often long) execution time. This can cause the pipeline to stall since the processor runs dry on data to execute. RISC design solves that problem because most of the operations, with exception of memory load/store ops, are short and quick. Hennessy borrowed these "new" concepts and came up with the MIPS architecture, one of the first popular RISC designs.
Not much later, Acorn Computer, looking to replace the MOS 6502 processor but dissatisfied with the Motorola 68000, National Semiconductor 32016 and others, went looking for a new chip in 1983. They traveled to the States and visited Western Design Center. Seeing how "simple" it was to design a processor, they brainstormed up the concept of the ARM1.
The ARM probably would never have been designed without the advances that came out of the VLSI Project. The ARM2, the first production unit, only contained some 30K transistors. The DARPA RISC-I was 44K while the RISC-II was reduced to 40K. The 68000 was a whopping 70K transistors.
Yep, I learned my first Assembly Language on the 6502 back in 1983 or so, and had just started writing cool, fast game and utility software on the Atari 800 around 1985 using the very nice Atari Macro Assembler, when *boom* the era of Atari was over.
So I moved to the Amiga and programmed that lovely machine in 680x0 assembler using the slick "DevPac" programming environment by HiSoft. Bad geek that I was, I never learned Intuition or any of the Amiga system calls, but went straight to the hardware for the titles I worked on, namely "Dino Wars" and "Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure" (apologies for both). Then *boom* the Amiga was dead.
After a long hiatus from programming I got a PowerMac. On the Mac the first software I bought was the fringe macro assembler "Fantasm" by Lightsoft, thinking I'd be a Mac Assembler guru, but alas, Apple had moved from 680x0 to the PowerPC by that time, and only insane maniacs program that chip directly in Assembler.
So finally, in 1995 I finally learned C, and a few years later C++.
Of course nowadays I learn a new programming language every year and an entirely new framework or API every couple of months.
-- thinkyhead software and media
The low-power, low-voltage op amps are impressive -- I'll see your LMC6462 and raise you an LT6003: 1.6 to 16 volts, 1uA supply, though the input resistance is slightly worse at 10GOhm (differential) to 2TOhm (common mode).
In some ways more impressive, imho, are the high speed precision op amps. Take a look at the LT1468, for example -- 90MHz, 75uV offset, and settles to 150uV in under a microsecond.
On the other hand, most of my breadboards still begin life with a uA741 or LM324 -- I'd much rather let the smoke out of a cheap op amp than an expensive one. Once the smoke stays in, I'll swap it for the one that will actually act as a precision part.
> PIC10F200, 41 cents
> 5 volt regulator, 16 cents
> LED
> resistor
> Vdd capacitor
This Bill of Materials is not gonna land your thingamajig in the dollar store!
Better:
NC7S14P (Single gate '14 Schmitt trigger inverter in sc70) : 4 Cents
2 R's: 2x 0.5 cent
2 C's: 2x 1 cent
Led: you get what you pay for
Runs from 2 to 6 Volts directly off your battery
I ended up with the LM258 because it fit my application -- controlling BuckPuck output on a hub dynamo-driven bike light. It needs to be making sense of its inputs with as little as 7.5 volts of power (when the LEDs begin to light) and not catch fire till 32V. But boy howdy, I used a bunch of LM324s in a theater lightboard almost 30 years ago.
I'd rather find out about interesting and unique chips, rather than ones that "shook the world".
Like the Propellar, with its interesting interrupt handling, and non-stamped design.
...you know you can make a 555-equivalent suitable for most purposes with a couple of 741's and some clever circuit design, right?
Yes, it's called an airport.
Damnit, I clicked Submit rather than Continue Editing!
This isn't so much impressive hardware, as impressive software:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5885351342753379583&q=8088
FMV on an 8088!
Okay, I admit, the quality/resolution isn't that good, but it's still fascinating. :P
While it's relatively new compared to everything on this list, the AMD Opteron, which came out in 2003, will be the face of computing for the foreseeable future. Even now in 2009 AMD's archival Intel is just coming out with integrated memory controllers and high-speed serial direct interconnects. The Opteron also forced Intel to give everyone 64-bit memory addressing in x86 (which Intel wanted to stay in the realm of high-end RISC/Itanium machines).
Opteron wasn't the first chip to have any of these features, but it was the first _x86_ chip to have all of them - making it an affordable "high-end" processor for small businesses and tech junkies. It really was a "world-shaking" product that put AMD on the map. No one expected little AMD to make a splash so big with Opteron (except Intel, which paid off companies to not release Opteron-based products, a55holes!).
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
They could not include every processor, of course, but this was a nice piece of hardware at the time. The Heathkit microprocessor trainers used it (programmed it to play Anchor's Away! as extra credit for retired Navy prof), had accum A, B, and an index register/addressing (the first uP to do so?), 16 bit regs, flat memory space and memory mapped I/O. Preceded the later 6502 which had a similar programming model. It was clean and fun to learn; the Intel architecture has always been foreign to me; was there separate I/O bus instructions? dunno...
I would make the argument that if you were going to pick an Intel CPU, that "shook the world", it would be the 80386 more than the 8088. Dubbed, the mainframe on the chip, it more or less lived up to its hype. Following in the wake of the 80386 came Linux and Windows NT... essentially server operating systems running on a desktop.
The 8088, conversely, was just another personal computer chip. It had some advantages but didn't really change the sorts of operating systems you could make with it. Atari, Apple and IBM DOS's were all single program, single user.
The reason was hardware. It was the 80386 that made it possible to do mainframe type things on a PC.
1) It had access to theoretically gobs of memory, introduced a flat memory model that eliminated once and for all the need to worry about 64k boundaries (this was even an issue with the 68000 - performance reasons),
2) all allowed for hardware based memory protection so that applications wouldn't trounce each other.
3) provided hardware support for virtual memory.
This is my sig.
The Propeller looks really interesting. I might get one to play with, but I'm disappointed by the lack of Linux support.
I'm also surprised they don't have *any* hardware peripherals on-chip. I'm used to working with the PIC microcontrollers, which give me tons of things like UARTs, USB interface, SPI controller, CAN bus, A/D converters, timers, PWM output, comparators, etc. Obviously some of that can be implemented with one of the cogs, but some of it would be hard or impossible. The lack of hardware multiply and divide support is also annoying.
Most of my projects involve interfacing with the outside world in some non-trivial fashion; the Propeller doesn't do much to make that easy, which is disappointing. I do appreciate that they have a DIP package, though -- most high-performance microcontrollers these days are surface-mount only, which makes breadboards somewhat tricky.
Actually, one could make the argument that we do not have enough segments. Were there more segments available within an application, you could have theoretically eliminated some sorts of attacks caused by buffer overruns.
Looking back at the time, going from segments to flat was a godsend. However, going from segments to selectors would have been probably better from a security standpoint, although computers would be slower.
This is my sig.
Will make sense to everyone, but $FDED only to Apple II buffs. :-) And screw Slashdot for messing up the formatting + not supporting PRE.
I doubt many of those would exist without the venerable 7400.
Now that was a chip that shook the world.
The Soviets shopped around for automated pipeline software.
The US gov provided just what they needed.
Computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.
"to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39147917,00.htm
For a number of years now I've worked as a programmer, and I've always wondered about electronics design. I took a few college classes in analogue and digital electronics, but they always seemed to focus mainly on the analysis of circuits or other peripheral issues such as semiconductor physics rather than the design process. As such I still have no idea about electronic design.
Reading this article I wonder how one can develop skills in designing basic circuits that utilize these and other chips? Can anyone recommend some books / courses that offer a relatively painless introduction to how one goes about actually designing and building circuits? Although I have a degree in mathematics / comp sci when I start reading books that are full of theorems and proofs I start to wonder do people in the real world actually use this as a basis of circuit design?
Also is there any open source software for circuit design?
Unfortunately the circuit designer seems to be a relatively rare breed compared to other technology professionals such as programmer.
The 8-bit Intel 8051 (descendant of the 8048) should have definitely been on the list. It's got great longevity and has had countless variants from dozens (hundreds?) of chip design companies. Name an embedded application and there's an 8051 variant for it (within the realm of 8/16-bit computing power). I'm not sure why there are so many variants, but I would think it'll be around long after every other architecture has died (including the x86).
The PowerPC should really be there. Not so much for its use in the Mac, but because it's so widespread in the embedded world. In fact, I think it's the most used embedded architecture by far. You might not think of your car or washing machine as "world-changing", at least not for their electronics, but actually the reliability of modern devices is largely down to this. The PPC must be one of the most common "invisible" bits of technology that most people actually use.
The first? (I know Intel 4004, arguably second.) Or The TI TMS9900. First single chip 16 bit architecture? Maybe they thought it was unfair. TI pretty much dominates the list anyway...
It's "outside the box", not "out of the box".
"Out of the box" is pretty much synonymous with "off the shelf."
12 - Transmeta Corp. Crusoe Processor (2000)
Yah OK technically not the 21st century. :)
But that's it? We haven't managed to come up with some new weirdo bizzaro way of adding numbers since 2000?
29 years 25 cips. 9 years nothing.
Are we at our limit? Or has comp sci evolved to some new level where the instruction set doesn't matter?
Any list is subjective, mine would include some 'fun' items from my hobbyist days - for example:
ZN414 TRF radio
SN76477 Sound generator
78xxx Three terminal regulators
27xx EPROM
4017 Decade counter
AT&ROFLMAO
Nah, you no longer need to be extremely inovative to produce awesome chips. These are the days of cheap transistors on nm manufacturing scales. We have gotten to the point where a clever way of doing something is obsolete, because its faster and cheaper to throw more transistors at our designs and resuse all our existing "cleverness".
There is something about limited resources that encourages amazing innovation. When we have "enough", why innovate?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
I don't know if it's fast enough for linux. It really is a microcontroller - not a full fledged CPU or SoC. It only has something like 32KB of RAM built-in. You might get one of those DOS-style assembly operating systems to run on it, but probably not linux.
I'd rate it somewhere up there with all those AVR CPUs used in projects like the Arduino - except with different capabilities.
Their website has a lot of downloadable code on it. Do some research and see if anyone has written code for what you need. :)
In 1997, a company in Sunnyvale, named Silicon Spice, created an amazing device. It had over 80,000,000 transistors, and replaced one or more huge (over 4 foot square) motherboards manufactured by ATT. The chip had a hundred simple cores, and massive amounts of peripheral network management and computing power.
It was called Callisto, and it was bought by Broadcom. Three genius, genius engineers from MIT created it, and it allowed high performance signal processors to be implemented in software. In fact it allowed multiple communication applications to run simultaneously, making dirt cheap large scale VOIP possible. Dynamic application switching allowed software for operating VOIP, to be swapped out with network management, modem operation, DSL, virtually anything you might want to throw over copper or fiber. A significant number of concepts in this device revolutionized telecommunications.
They have the RISC-I in there, it's called the SPARC.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Bill Mensch went on to start his own company designing successors to the 6502.
Cyberdyne Systems?
There are some major differences between SPARC and RISC I. SPARC has a variable number of register windows arranged in a circle. This is where the 'scalable' in the name comes from. Simple SPARC chips for embedded applications typically only have 2-3 register windows, while high-end workstation chips have 8 or more. Because they are arranged in a circle, programmers can assume there are an infinite number and just handle the fault when you try to use one more than there really is. RISC I and RISC II both had static register files and the programmer (or, more commonly, compiler writer) had to be aware of the exact number.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The interrupt-handling design on the propeller isn't particularly novel, unless you restrict yourself to PC hardware. Mainframes and supercomputers often handle interrupts like this, on a separate, dedicated, interrupt controller. A typical IBM supercomputer, for example, has one or two PowerPC 4xx series chips for handling I/O without the need to interrupt the main CPU. The Wikipedia article is also slightly misleading, when it talks about saving state and then restoring it to handle an interrupt. A lot of chips have some special registers which are only visible in privileged mode (e.g. in ISRs) and will have ISRs written specifically to only touch these, making the switch to and from an ISR much faster than a typical function call.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I meant Linux development support -- it would need a lot more memory and an MMU to get Linux running on it.
As a 32-bit device at 20 MIPS per core and 8 cores, it has significantly more performance than the 8-bit AVRs (40 MIPS max, I believe) and PICs (12 MIPS) in most applications. The PICs will outperform it if you need a lot of multiplies -- hardware multiply of 8 by 8 to 16 bit result in a single cycle; that can do a 16x16 to 32 in about 2us, iirc. A single propeller core looks like it would be a bit slower at that, but if you can get several cores working on the problem, it might do better.
For performance in a hobbyist-friendly DIP package, though, the real competitor is the 16-bit dsPIC line. Those have a pair of 40-bit accumulators and a DSP engine that can do a single cycle A += B*C, where B and C are 16 bit variables in memory and A is the accumulator. And it will increment the registers that store the pointers, so you really can do an n-element 16-bit dot product in n cycles, running at 40 MIPS.
If you're interfacing purely with other digital hardware, I suspect that in many cases you could replace the hardware peripherals of a PIC with a cog, at a cost in software complexity. The end result is that you have one main thread talking to several peripherals, much like in a PIC.
Thats not the only thing Doctor 'Wang' was good at.
Oh my word, that was amazing.
Can I cut your lawn now?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Most of that is completely over my head, but it does sound interesting.
Today I stumbled on yet another Propeller project - A wiki reader.
http://hackaday.com/2009/05/02/wikibrowser/
The project homepage is linked in the comments. I think the reader would be better with some formatting, but still quite neat!
Before they came out, at one company I worked for, I replaced a measuring system using a storage oscilloscope with a box containing an RCA microprocessor, a precision comparator, and a D/A converter which drew the output on a screen for as long as you wanted, and then digitised the measurement sweep on demand. The entire thing including a monitor cost less than a single replacement tube for the scopes, and had infinite persistence without fading. That was when I realised how revolutionary A/A and A/D conversion were going to be. Nowadays you can do the entire thing with a single embedded microcontroller. But the 3 1/2 digit A/D is still much more accurate for single point measurements.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Seriously, it was the first commercially produced blitter! It allowed the Amiga to multitask smoothly and reliably with only 256k of ram. It had a huge impact on gfx chipsets to come after it.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
What, no Deep Crack? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_crack
"But the 6502? A lucky near-clone of the 6800 that was popular not because it was particularly innovative, but because it was cheap. The 8088? The bastard stepchild of the 8086 which lucked out in getting picked over the 68000 in the IBM PC."
The article is entitled, "25 Microchips That Shook the World". The criteria is chips which were influential in their impact. That doesn't necessarily mean they had clean or clever designs, or were particularly innovative, or even "good" by any objective measure. It means that they mattered in the course of industry.
You dismiss the 6502 because it's only innovation was low cost. That still counts, and arguably more than most other distinctions. The Ford Model T, the Apple II, the IBM-PC clones, even books printed on the Gutenberg printing press -- their big difference was that they were cheap enough to bring their products to a much wider market. Legions of people who couldn't afford technology before suddenly could .
The 8088's big feature was being in the right place at the right time, no doubt about it. But it still went on to propel the x86 in to being the dominant architecture for general-purpose computers today. Wintel uses it. Apple Mac uses it. Most free *nix boxes use it. Sun uses it in many of their products. Even supercomputers use it. Quite simply, x86 is everywhere. That's "world shaking" by any definition I can think of.
There's a lesson here, too. Many times engineers and geeks favor technically sophisticated or clean designs, and reject designs which don't meet those criteria, and loose big time when their theoretically "better" design loose out to a cheaper or more practical alternative. Call it "worst is better" if you like, but putting all your money on a horse that loses the race isn't good, either.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The article only briefly touches on the 1802, which was a ground-breaking chip that found its way into satellites and control systems for just about every kind of military gear you could think of.
I built a Cosmac Elf as a science fair project in high school, and it was a blast. The heart was an 1802 processor -- I didn't get the rad-hardened version in the ceramic package, which would have cost far more than my shoestring budget could afford, but the plastic package version instead. The design was already old when I started wire wrapping this thing, so some parts had to be replaced with improvised versions (e.g., the hexadecimal display chips that had dot-matrix LEDs on the top face, and took a nybble as input -- had to replace those with 8 discrete LEDs and read output in straight binary).
One of the things I liked about the 1802 is that it had TTL outputs with enough juice to drive certain control circuits without a bunch of extra coupling hardware. (Some low power devices could be driven directly, and everything else just needed a cheap transistor. I drove relays with this thing.) There were also inputs to which you could directly attach some analog domain sensors, such as a photoresistor.
Sorry to see the 1802 didn't make the list, but at least they included the 555 and the 741.
Surprised they didn't mention that the 68000 was one of the few CPUs to use a nanocode architecture to decode microcode operations, in order to reduce the chip real-estate used for storing decode logic -- in my grad level CPU architecture class, the technique was likened to using two smaller ROMs and a bit of clever logic to replace one huge ROM. (And when I took 6.004 as an undergrad, we actually built a discrete component computer using this exact same technique -- one EPROM was for the nanocode interpreter, and two served the microcode interpreter. Oddly enough, we were told by our professor, "This technique would never be used in the real world." Maybe not in 1993, but the 68000 has an older pedigree, and was apparently one of the last few chips to be designed by hand. If I were those guys, I too would be using every trick and cheat to reduce transistor count.)