The Most Influential Microprocessors of All Time

http://www.pcworld.com/article/171171/influential_processors.html

by jfaucett • 13 years ago

50 67 13 years ago

jfaucett2• 13 years ago

came 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 :)

huxley5• 13 years ago

One 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

jfaucett2• 13 years ago

interesting, 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/, and 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)

angersock5• 13 years ago

What, no love for SPARC or MIPS?

Further, no love for Transmeta?

Poor show.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

It's a field of heavy-hitters. The 4004, 8088, and Opteron 240 each ushered in a new age in microprocessors.

angersock5• 13 years ago

Do 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?

bowyakka• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

I dont think Transmeta ended up being that influential. Sparc/Mips as the birth of RISC should be there.

angersock5• 13 years ago

I 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?

jotm• 13 years ago

I remember the Crusoe - it was ahead of its time, focusing on low heat and power consumption at a time when TDP meant nothing to the customers...

oso2k• 13 years ago

I 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-App...

yread• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

To 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.

danmaz7410• 13 years ago

Yes, 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.

colomon2• 13 years ago

I 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.)

huxley5• 13 years ago

I think that's pretty much out of date, as far as I can find only a total 17 million Commodore 64s were ever sold (even the most unrealistic estimates put it at 30 million), Apple sells about 15 million iPads per quarter, with models being sold for about a year.

source: http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Commodore#Sales_numbers_.2...

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

Technically the C64 had a 6510 in it, though of course the 6510 was essentially just a 6502 plus an extra I/O port and you're right that they really should have mentioned it somewhere in the "variants" section of the 6502 writeup.

tluyben23• 13 years ago

I was very surprised to see the Apple here as well; sure nice but surely the C64 was far more important.

Someone3• 13 years ago

I think they are correct in stating that the Apple 2 was the breakthrough application of the 6502. The C64 was a tsunami, but it came after the breakthrough.

That's also why they list the Mac for the 68000, not the Atari 400 or the Amiga, the Archimedes for ARM, even though it got way more popular later, and the Altair for the 8080 even though that probably sold less than even today's greatest flop.

I do find it weird that all the most influential microprocessors happened to have their breakthrough in a PC. Surely, there were influential embedded CPUs? For example, where's the 8051?

InclinedPlane6• 13 years ago

There's a really neat talk on reverse engineering the 6502: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5miMbqYB4E

It's pretty long but well worth a listen, there's some really fascinating stuff in it.

danellis• 13 years ago

To show it without a BBC Micro seems like a huge oversight, too. The Beeb was hugely influential in the UK in the 1980s -- every school had them.

djcb• 13 years ago

Had 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.

tluyben23• 13 years ago

Same 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• 13 years ago

nostalgia :) The simple logical simplicity of this

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 :).

analog312• 13 years ago

My 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• 13 years ago

Ah 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• 13 years ago

I'd say the Commodore PET was the 6502's breakthrough machine

Crito• 13 years ago

Like 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).

InclinedPlane6• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

I don't read articles that require me to click through a slideshow.

analog312• 13 years ago

I'd give honorable mention to one of, or the whole class of, ultra low cost and low power microcontrollers that are everywhere.

KevinMS• 13 years ago

Does 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

alayne• 13 years ago

That Roland is actually an analog synthesizer 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.

The Most Influential Microprocessors of All Time

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