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Microchips That Shook the World (2009)
- ableal 8y agoThat's a good overview, and it made me think of a parallel list of chips that got quite a lot of press but did not shake the world much after all. Off the cuff, Intel would have two solid entries with the iAPX 432 and the Itanium, there's probably some Lisp machine and putative 'Japanese 5th gen computer' silicon to add, and maybe the Transmeta Crusoe could have honors in both lists ...
- pinewurst 8y agoI'd argue that the Itanium did "shake the world" due to the vast hype. In a sense it killed the server RISC processors (MIPS, SPARC, HP-PA) because the competition was so afraid of what Intel could bring to bear.
- rjsw 8y agoAt the time, the Transmeta Crusoe was the only x86 System on Chip (SoC). Every other CPU needed an extra chipset to provide a PCI bus.
- bunnycorn 8y agoGreat selection, great article. The only one I find missing would be the GPU of Nvidia's 8800 graphics card, I belive it was the first GPU that could be used for GPGPU. (Correct me if I'm wrong).
- opencl 8y agoSort of. The Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360 was the first with a unified shader architecture but the 8800 was indeed the first one for PC. If you want to get a little more pedantic, GPGPU has been around in some form as long as programmable shaders have by (ab)using graphics APIs. But unified shaders made it a lot more flexible/useful/less hacky and were definitely the start of modern GPGPU efforts.
- agumonkey 8y agoReminds me that Evans & Sutherland, before framebuffer were cheap enough, programmed their GUIs fully based on streamed / laziness.
- rbanffy 8y agoI lost count of how many ARMs I saw doing the job of 555's...
- rasz 8y agoTo be fair microcontroller price is nowadays mainly influenced by packaging cost and profit margin. You can buy microcontrollers that are cheaper than 555, and its easier to find code monkey than competent EE able to design analog circuits.
- perl4ever 8y ago"Camenzind was working as a consultant to Signetics, a local semiconductor firm. The economy was tanking. He was making less than US $15 000 a year and had a wife and four children at home." $15,000 in the summer of 1970 is equivalent to about $97,000 today.