Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present (V 13.0.0)

last major update: May 2003
last minor update: May 2003
More CPU info (Including WWW sites of some companies mentioned here) can be found at The CPU Info Center:
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/

More detailed documentation of microprocessor instructions sets can be found at Microprocessor instruction set cards:
http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/cards.html

A very detailed (and much more accurate) chronology of microcomputer history can be found at Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers:
http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/comphist/

A list of architects, and some architecture descriptions which are more detailed (and probably accurate) than those found here is available at Mark Smotherman's list of Recent Computer Architects:
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/architects.html.
More computer innovators can be found at The History Of Modern Computers And Their Inventors:
http://inventors.about.com/education/inventors/library/blcoindex.htm

An online dictionary of computing terms you might find on this page can be found at the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing:
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/
Or one of it's many mirror sites

Feel free to send me comments at (new email address):
john.bayko@sk.sympatico.ca

Please note that links inserted into this page by browser products like EZula TOPtext or Microsoft Smart Tags may refer to inaccurate or incorrect information or broken links, and may have the ability to replace the links on this page with those chosen by the browser product provider - I can't take responsibility for the results of those products when viewing this page. Use them at your own risk.

Introduction: What's a "Great CPU"?

A microprocessor generally means a CPU on a single silicon chip, but exceptions have been made (and are documented) when the CPU includes particularly interesting design ideas, and is generally the result of the microprocessor design philosophy. However, towards the more modern designs, design from other fields overlap, and this criterion becomes rather fuzzy. In addition, parts that used to be separate (FPU, MMU) are now usually considered part of the CPU design.

Another note on terminology - because of the muddling of the term "RISC" by marketroids, I've avoided using those terms here to refer to architectures. And anyway, there are in fact four architecture families, not two. So I use "memory-data" and "load-store" to refer to CISC and RISC architectures. This file is not intended as a reference work, though all attempts (well, many attempts) have been made to ensure its accuracy. It includes material from text books, magazine articles and papers, authoritative descriptions and half remembered folklore from obscure sources (and net.people who I'd like to thank for their many helpful comments). As such, it has no bibliography or list of references.

In other words, "For entertainment use only".

Enjoy, criticize, distribute and quote from this list freely.

By: John Bayko (Tau).
Internet: john.bayko@sk.sympatico.ca

An explanation of the version numbers:

    ##.##.##
 |  |  |
 |  |  +-- small, usually 2 sentences or less.
 |  +--- changes a paragraph or more, or several descriptions
 +---- CPU added or deleted.

• Section One: Before the Great Dark Cloud.
• Part I: The Intel 4004, the first (Nov 1971) . .
• Part II: TMS 1000, First microcontroller (1974) .
• Part III: The Intel 8080 (April 1974) . . .
• Part IV: The Zilog Z-80 - End of an 8-bit line (July 1976) . . . .
• Part V: The 650x, Another Direction (1975) . . .
• Part VI: The 6809, extending the 680x (1977) . . . . . . . .
• Part VII: Advanced Micro Devices Am2901, a few bits at a time . .
• Part VIII: Intel 8051, Descendant of the 8048. . . .
• Part IX: Microchip Technology PIC 16x/17x, call it RISC (1975) . . .
• Part X: Atmel AVR - RISC ridiculously small (June 1997) .
• Section Two: Forgotten/Innovative Designs before the Great Dark Cloud
• Part I: RCA 1802, weirdness at its best (1974) .
• Part II: Fairchild F8, Register windows .
• Part III: SC/MP, early advanced multiprocessing (April 1976) . . . .
• Part IV: F100-L, a self expanding design .
• Part V: The Western Digital 3-chip CPU (June 1976) .
• Part VI: Intersil 6100, old design in a new package . . .
• Part VII: NOVA, another popular adaptation . . . .
• Part VIII: Signetics 2650, enhanced accumulator based (1978?) .
• Part IX: Signetics 8x300, Early cambrian DSP ancestor (1978) . .
• Part X: Hitachi 6301 - Small and microcoded (1983) .
• Part XI: Motorola MC14500B ICU, one bit at a time .
• Section Three: The Great Dark Cloud Falls: IBM's Choice.
• Part I: DEC PDP-11, benchmark for the first 16/32 bit generation. (1970) . . . .
• Part II: TMS 9900, first of the 16 bits (June 1976) . .
• Part III: Zilog Z-8000, another direct competitor . . . .
• Part IV: Motorola 68000, a refined 16/32 bit CPU (September 1979) . . . . . . . . .
• Part V: National Semiconductor 32032, similar but different . . . .
• Part VI: MIL-STD-1750 - Military artificial intelligence (February 1979) .
• Part VII: Intel 8086, IBM's choice (1978) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
• Section Four: Unix and RISC, a New Hope
• Part I: TRON, between the ages (1987) . .
• Part II: SPARC, an extreme windowed RISC (1987) . .
• Part III: AMD 29000, a flexible register set (1987) . .
• Part IV:Siemens 80C166, Embedded load-store with register windows. . .
• Part V: MIPS R2000, the other approach. (June 1986) . . . . . . . . . . .
• Part VI: Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC, a conservative RISC (Oct 1986) . . . . . .
• Part VII: Motorola 88000, Late but elegant (mid 1988) . . . .
• Part VIII: Fairchild/Intergraph Clipper, An also-ran (1986) . .
• Part IX: Acorn ARM, RISC for the masses (1986) . . . .
• Part X: TMS320C30, a popular DSP architecture (1988) . . . .
• Part XI: Motorola DSP96002, an elegant DSP architecture . . . . . . . . . .
• Part XII: Hitachi SuperH series, Embedded, small, economical (1992) . . . . . . .
• Part XIII: Motorola MCore, RISC brother to ColdFire (Early 1998) .
• Part XIV: TI MSP430 series, PDP-11 rediscovered (late 1998?) .
• Section Five: Born Beyond Scalar
• Part I: Intel 960, Intel quietly gets it right (1987 or 1988?) . . . .
• Part II: Apollo PRISM - Superworkstation (1988) . .
• Part III: Intel 860, "Cray on a Chip" (late 1988?) . . .
• Part IV: IBM RS/6000 POWER chips (1990) . . . .
• Part V: DEC Alpha, Designed for the future (1992) . . .
• Section Six: Beyond RISC - Search for a New Paradigm
• Part I: Philips Trimedia - A Media processor (1996) .
• Part II: TMS320C6x: Variable length instruction groups (late 1997) . . . .
• Part III: Intel/HP IA-64 - Height of speculation (late 1999) . . . .
• Part IV: Sun MAJC - Levels of parallelism (late 1999) .
• Part V: Transmeta Crusoe - Leaving hardware (January 2000) .
• Part VI: Eleven Engineering XInC - Real-time multithreading (August 2002) . .
• Section Seven: Weird and Innovative Chips
• Part I: Intel 432, Extraordinary complexity (1980) . .
• Part II: Rekursiv, an object oriented processor .
• Part III: MISC M17: Casting Forth in Silicon[1] (pre 1988?) . .
• Part IV: AT&T CRISP/Hobbit, CISC amongst the RISC (1987) . . . .
• Part V: T-9000, parallel computing (1994) . . . . . .
• Part VI: Patriot Scientific ShBoom: from Forth to Java (April 1996) . .
• Part VII: Sun picoJava - not another language-specific processor! (October 1997) . .
• Part VIII: Imsys Cjip - embedded WISC (Writable Instruction Set Computer) (Mid 2000) .
• Appendices
• Appendix A: RISC and CISC Definitions
  • IBM System 360/370/390: The Mainframe(1964) . . . .
  • VAX: The Penultimate CISC (1978) .
  • RISC Roots: CDC 6600 (1965) . .
  • RISC Formalised: IBM 801 . . .
  • RISC Refined: Berkeley RISC, Stanford MIPS . .
• Appendix B: Virtual Machine Architectures
  • Forth: Stack oriented period .
  • UCSD p-System: Portable Pascal . . . .
  • Java: Once was Oak . . . .
• Appendix C: CPU Features
• Appendix D: Graphics matrix operations
• Appendix E: Announcements from IEEE Computer
• Appendix F: Memory Types