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The Most Influential Microprocessors of All Time
- jfaucett 13y agocame across this and thought other HNers might find it interesting, my favorite on this list has to be the "RCA COSMAC CDP 1802" for the 2001 quality alone not to mention radiation-hardening :)
- huxley 13y agoOne thing I noticed was that the article incorrectly claims that the RCA COSMAC CDP 1802 was used in Voyager and Viking missions, but it wasn't used until Galileo
- jfaucett 13y agointeresting, it appears you are right. When looking for more info as to what was actually used I found this link : http://www.decodesystems.com/cosmac/ http://www.decodesystems.com/cosmac/, and http://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html http://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html, that both give a little more detail as to what was used on the Voyager and Viking missions. EDIT: (another link: http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html)
- angersock 13y agoWhat, no love for SPARC or MIPS? Further, no love for Transmeta? Poor show.
- sliverstorm 13y agoIt's a field of heavy-hitters. The 4004, 8088, and Opteron 240 each ushered in a new age in microprocessors.
- angersock 13y agoDo we have anything like that in the works right now? Everything seems to be fairly straightforward evolutions of the x86 or ARM--though maybe the innovation is happening over in FPGAs or business-not-tech venues?
- sliverstorm 13y agoWell, if that sort of thing is indeed in the works, I doubt anyone would tell us- competitive advantage and all that- but it has been ten years since the Opteron 240. Maybe it will be time for the next one soon. It could even be one of many technologies recently on the market. "Influence" is a legacy; you can't see it on launch day. Maybe one day we will look back on hUMA [0] and say it was one of those Things? The PS4 processor in particular, as the first processor with hUMA. Although, it does look to me like innovation is more gradual now just as a matter of fact- the business cycle is much shorter now. The 4004 was released in '71, the 8088 in '79, but today every chip vendor releases a new chip every six months, so changes will naturally be spread across releases and it will be harder to point and say "There, right there, that is where the world changed" [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_memory_access#hUMA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_memory_access#hUMA
- MrBuddyCasino 13y agoI agree with hUMA, but don't forget that the game is now mostly about power efficiency. Also, GPUs.
- Symmetry 13y agoProbably this if anything: http://ootbcomp.com/ http://ootbcomp.com/ EDIT: They're releasing explanations as they submit patents, so not everything is public yet. I just submitted the most recent talk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7027115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7027115
- bunderbunder 13y agoI imagine in another few years the Intel Core Duo will make the list, because of its status as the first major multicore CPU on the consumer market. Realize that's still x86. I'm not sure we'll see that change, though. Another hugely influential Intel chip is behind that story: Itanium marks the point at which it became clear that the market's no longer receptive to completely new ISAs in general-purpose CPUs.
- bowyakka 13y agoI would add the P6 architecture to that list, I feel that it was the redemption of many of the ideas in the i960 as well as its designer. It was the one that finally lifted intel in peoples viewpoint. I think that a lot of people fail to realise just how much of intel's product lineup in the last 14 years can be traced to the P6 microarchitecture.
- justincormack 13y agoI dont think Transmeta ended up being that influential. Sparc/Mips as the birth of RISC should be there.
- angersock 13y agoI was under the impression that they were munched by Intel and basically became the foundation for the microcode that those chips use now. Am I wrong?
- masklinn 13y ago> I was under the impression that they were munched by Intel Nope, you must be thinking about something else. Transmeta started moving into IP in 2005, sued intel for patent infringement in 2006 (settled for a cool 250mil, Intel got a perpetual, non-exclusive license out of it), licensed tech to Nvidia in 2008 and died in 2009 (was acquired by Novafora in January, Novafora collapsed in July but not before Intellectual Vultures made off with the patent stash in Feb) Now part of Intel's activity at the time (the PIII and Pentium M side which ended up with Core) may well have been inspired by Transmeta (as many allege), but at the same time Transmeta's activity best matches Intel's pursuit of the NetBurst (P4) shit-cake, which ran opposite to pretty much anything Transmeta looked for (unless Transmeta had patents on lofty promises they couldn't come close to deliver on, then year the P4 fits).
- angersock 13y agoAh, fantastic. Thanks for the info! Fun fact: TX/RX Labs (Houston Hackerspace) has a rack of old Transmeta blade servers that a former member donated.
- Symmetry 13y agoThere's speculation that NVidia's Project Denver is an Efficeon reworked to target ARM code rather than x86. So there might be a live Transmeta descendant out in the real world again in a few months. http://anandtech.com/show/7622/nvidia-tegra-k1/2 http://anandtech.com/show/7622/nvidia-tegra-k1/2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver
- oso2k 13y agoI would certainly agree that MIPS, at least as reference architecture, is an very important part of all modern architectures. The Patterson/Hennesey book [1] is absolutely require reading for many Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering departments (even my state school required it) in undergrad, and most certainly required in graduate school when Computer Architecture turns to pipelining, cache structures and hierarchies, micro-architecture vs. macro-architecture, instruction set design, etc. Without MIPS, there isn't a baseline architecture to talk about in these courses as all other commercial architectures quickly begin to show their biases and optimization strategies. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Approach-3rd-ebook/dp/B004A16R3O/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1389217690&sr=8-3&keywords=computer+architecture+a+quantitative+approach http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-App...
- yread 13y agoI guess you can never make a list that satisfies everybody. I would like to see something with DEC Alpha there (not only) for the integrated memory controller. Or Nehalem.
- lasermike026 13y agoTo show the MOS 6502 without the Commodore 64 is a HUGE oversight. The C64 was the most prolific computer of the 80's. Thank you Chuck Peddle for the 6502. Thank you Bob Russell and Bob Yannes for the C64. Jack Tramiel, thank you for providing computers for the masses not the classes.
- danmaz74 13y agoYes, it's incredible how the Apple myth is really rewriting the early history of computers in people's minds. By the way, the C64 was not just the most prolific computer of the 80s - it remains the most sold computer model in history.
- colomon 13y agoI was a C64 kid all the way, but the Apple II was released four or five years earlier than the C64. It very definitely blazed the way for the C64, and arguably deserves the place of honor in the list; I don't think the C64 would have been what it was without Apple going first. (Leaving C64 totally off the 6502 list is a travesty, though.)
- danmaz74 13y agoBut the Commodore PET was released the same year of the Apple II, and outsold it during the first years. The myth is that there was only the Apple II, and everyone else copied it - that's definitely not true.
- colomon 13y agoThe C64 was very clearly Commodore's attempt to use its technology to make an Apple II-style home computer. Oh! I just checked on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET#Origins_and_the_early_models http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET#Origins_and_the_e... and here's something I didn't know: "In September 1976 Peddle got a demonstration of Jobs and Wozniak's Apple II prototype, when Jobs was offering to sell it to Commodore, but Commodore considered Jobs' offer too expensive." So it turns out even the PET was at least somewhat inspired by the Apple II. Like I said, I loved my C64. But I remember when it came out, and everyone understood it was Commodore's answer to the Apple II. A very successful answer, mind you!
- djcb 13y agoHad a lot of (slightly masochistic) fun programming the Z80 back in the day on my MSX2 machine. I didn't have an assembler, so I wrote my code by taking the opcodes from a table, calculating offsets etc., then turning them into DATA-lines in an MSX-Basic program, which POKEd the code into RAM, then CALL into the starting address.
- tluyben2 13y agoSame here! And i'm not sure was is masochistic about it; I still write software for the MSX2 like that now ;) I only knew about Hisoft assembler and that was too expensive so I never learned anything different than opcodes.
- VladRussian2 13y agonostalgia :) The simple logical simplicity of this http://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html http://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html allowed, after some short time without even looking at the table, to type the binary code directly in (our preferred way of the Forth words implementation back then, on Russian 8080 clone of course :).
- tluyben2 13y agoWhen I got my MSX from the attic after almost 30 years I still remembered almost all the opcodes. Took me few days to relearn the rest; I was 8 when I memorised them...
- analog31 13y agoMy first intro to microprocessors was the Z80 book published by Howard Sams. I never actually tried using one, but the book was so well written that it gave me an excellent foundation. I'd probably recommend one of the older uP's for anybody who is just getting started, as they are so much simpler.
- caprad 13y agoAh yes, so much power going the assembly code route, it took me a while to shake it. Started entering opcodes in the z80, and thought that Masm was as good as it could get. Was still doing Windows x86 assembly programming, until I found another way.
- markb139 13y agoI'd say the Commodore PET was the 6502's breakthrough machine
- Crito 13y agoLike the Z80, the M68k can still be found today inside of some TI graphing calculators (the 89 series, 92, and V200. The 80, 81, 82, 83 and 84 series, and the 85/86 have Z80's).
- InclinedPlane 13y agoThe 8080 and the 8088 but no 386? No P6? This list isn't very well balanced. The 386 revolutionized computing. It introduced an architecture that is still alive today and held market dominance for over 20 years (which is more than half the duration of the micro-computer age itself). And the P6 (Pentium Pro) architecture erased the old CISC/RISC boundary, enabling x86 code to run seamlessly on effectively state-of-the art RISC cores, extending the lifetime of the architecture tremendously.
- bane 13y agoThe gameboy uses an LR35902 by Sharp, which is not exactly a Z80. It's kind of in the middle of the 8080 and Z80 chips IIR, so you could consider it a variant of either. It was also the audio co-processor in the Genesis/Megadrive and the Neo-Geo alongside the M68k CPUs. A friend's father, who works in embedded environmental control systems once showed me a control board for a heating and a/c system that was powered by a Z80. It had inputs for a dozen or so temperature sensors that were to be placed throughout a building and the CPU only needed to be fast enough to poll them every few seconds. The number of sensors was limited to the addressability of an 8-bit CPU, so under 256. They should also mention the Japanese MSX standard which was Z80 centered for the first few generations and is the source of a great many very recognizable video game series (most of which were ported to the 6502 used by the NES). The last generation used a crazy variant called the R800, which I suppose would be like the 80286 was to the 8080.
- cowpig 13y agoI don't read articles that require me to click through a slideshow.
- analog31 13y agoI'd give honorable mention to one of, or the whole class of, ultra low cost and low power microcontrollers that are everywhere.
- KevinMS 13y agoDoes anybody know if a particular chip was used in the cheap keyboard synthesizers that came out in the 80's? What could be more influential than influencing how a decade of music sounded? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpfWORQWhU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpfWORQWhU
- alayne 13y agoThat Roland is actually an analog synthesizer http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/sh09.php http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/sh09.php That is really more 70s tech. Much of the 80s stereotypical synthesizer sound is due to the use of FM synthesis which can be thin sounding. There are a lot of classics from that era like the Yamaha DX7.