The 2000s have come along and it's too early yet to say what will have happened by decade's end. As Federico Faggin said, the exponential progression of Moore's law cannot continue forever. As the day nears when process will be measured in Angstroms instead of nanometers, researchers are furiously experimenting with layout, materials, concepts, and process. After all, today's microprocessors are based on the same architecture and processes that were first invented 30 years ago -- something has definitely got to give.
We are not at the end of the decade yet, but from where we sit at its mid-way point, the major players are few, and can easily be arranged on a pretty small scorecard:
In high-end UNIX, DEC has phased out Alpha, SGI uses Intel, and Sun is planning to outsource production of SPARC to Fujitsu (IBM continues to make its own chips). RISC is still king, but its MIPS and ARM variants are found mostly in embedded systems.
In 64-bit desktop computing, the DEC Alpha is being phased out, and HP just ended its Itanium alliance with Intel. The AMD 64 (and its clones) and the IBM PowerPC are the major players, while in the desktop arena as a whole, Intel, AMD, and VIA make x86-compatible processors along RISC lines.
As for 2005 and beyond, the second half of the decade is sure to bring as many surprises as the first. Maybe you have ideas as to what they might be! Take this month's chips challenge, and let us know your predictions for chips in 2005.
The history of microprocessors is a robust topic -- this article hasn't covered everything, and we apologize for any omissions. Please e-mail the Power Architecture editors with any corrections or additions to the information provided here.
- Wikipedia offers a broad history of the microprocessor in its many architectures and incarnations and CPU Design.
- Other Wiki entries germane to today's story include Fairchild Semiconductor and William Shockley, as well as RISC andCMOS.
- Contemporaneous (and not so contemporaneous) independent discovery and invention plagues historians at every turn. Did you think Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod? He did, of course - but he was beat to production by Prokop Divis (whose lightning conductor was torn down by an angry Moravian mob who was convinced it had caused a drought). The light bulb was not invented by Edison any more than radio by Marconi or the mechanical calculator by Pascal (or even Schickard!).
- Independent discovery is not the only thing that makes tracing these histories difficult: inventors also quite naturally have a habit of building on the work of others: DeForest refined Fleming's vacuum tube while investigating observations that had been made by Edison. The first transistor was made by Bardeen and Brattain in 1947, and refined by Shockley in 1950 - and none of them would have been possible without prior work on the conductivity of germanium by AT&T Bell Labs' Russel Ohl. Although Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley shared a Nobel Prize for their work, AT&T never was granted a patent, because of Lilienfeld's prior art (there is some evidence that project lead Shockley was familiar with Lilienfield's work).
- Tracing the invention of the integrated circuit and its evolution into the microprocessor leads you through a similarly tangled web: the idea of putting an entire circuit on a chip was proposed as early as 1952 by G. W. A. Dummer, and by 1959 Richard Feynman was urging his colleagues to go nano in his well-known talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor both invented integrated circuits independently in 1958. Kilby got the Nobel Prize, Noyce got the patent.
- Things get even more muddied tracing the lineage of the Intel 4004. The official version usually places the credit on the shoulders of Marcian "Ted" Hoff and Stanley Mazor. Others insist that as the designer, Federico Faggin deserves the most credit (a few will say that Matasoshi Shima deserves equal billing with Faggin). More recently, Wayne D. Pickette, who also worked with Faggin and Shima, has stepped forward to say that the 4004 also owes a great deal to the PDP-8. Of all of the people named above, only Federico Faggin's initials are etched directly onto the 4004.
Things are much calmer over Texas Instruments' way, where Gary Boone's 1973 patent for the single-chip microprocessor architecture has not been, as far as we know, ever been disputed. - Links to Microprocessor Resources provides a comprehensive list of histories of microchip development. As well, micro history sites you will enjoy include John Bayko's Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present (V 13.4.0), Mark Smotherman's Who are the computer architects?, and The History of Computing Project's History of hardware (to name but a few). The COMPUTERS' HISTORY page has a nice timeline (alas, only to 1995) while the Computers & Microprocessors site employs shocking colors, but includes good links.
- Some individual chips that are less-often mentioned in those histories include the Fairchild f8 which was included in the Channel F home video system. You will also find the history of Intel's star-crossed 32-bit 432 intriguing. Texas Instruments' new TV tuner chip is described at CNN.
- Read the developerWorks article, The year in microprocessors, which outlines the themes of the microprocessor industry in 2004 (developerWorks, December 2004).
- For IBM's role in processor production see "POWER to the people (A history of chipmaking at IBM") (developerWorks, August 2004), and PowerPC Architecture: A high-performance architecture with a history both from IBM. A Look Back at the IBM PC (IT Management, 2004) and 27 years of IBM RISC and Andrew Allison's A Brief History of RISC.
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- Download a IBM PowerPC 405 Evaluation Kit to demo a SoC in a simulated environment, or just to explore the fully licensed version of Power Architecture technology. This and other fine Power Architecture-related downloads are listed in the developerWorks Power Architecture technology content area's downloads section.
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