So while I'm waiting my breakfast to be microwave, I'm going to list out various processors that has been produce over the years.. ( no does not include DSP, PIC and all other exotic processors)

MIPS - SGI
PA-RISC - HP
Alpha - Digital, Compaq, HP
VAX - Digital
x86 - Intel, AMD, Via, Cyrix, National Semiconductor, Zilog, IBM
Power Processor, 68000 - Motorola, IBM
6800 - Motorola
SPARC - Fujitsu, Sun
ARM - errmm.. everyone?
EPIC - Intel, Transmeta (or you could group them with VLIW with x86)

From the huge list of companies producing processors it has been cut down to these few companies and processors:

x86 - Intel, AMD, Via
Power - Motorola, IBM
PA-RISC - HP
EPIC - Intel, Transmeta,
SPARC - Fujitsu, Sun
Alpha - HP
MIPS - SGI
ARM

In 5 years time, you'll be left with:

x86 - Intel, AMD, Via
Power - IBM
EPIC - Intel
SPARC - Fujitsu, Sun
ARM

Sad... but I miss the the olden days, so many processors to choose from and Alpha was the king of the hill. Even Cray uses them for their Supercomputer. It is sad to see that Alpha had to die because of bad marketing.. Even with its FX!32 translator, it could kick Pentium Pro's ass in most of Windows NT applications. No one could touch it. *Sigh* first 500MHz processor.. that's in 1995 when the rest of the field was only at 100 to 200MHz

I've always love MIPS processor. It is simple, fast, and elegant. However due to one miss step after another by SGI, they dropped the MIPS processor for Itanium in 1997 or 1998 (can't remember). They were hopping that Itanium would come in big in 1999 but sadly it didn't. MIPS processor lagged behind in 1999 till 2003. They didn't put in enough efforts to improve on the MIPS. SGI had its lucky break in 2002 (can't remember, or 2003) when Itanium II came out. They start mass producing super computers with the Itanium II, with their Altix line. So far they won quite a few contracts for their Altix line from NASA and Universities.

PA-RISC, well its basically a smart cache. IIRC, they had 1.5MB of L1 cache and an obscene amount of L2 cache, 2? 3MB worth of them (it was huge in 1995). They were fast because it has such a big memory to play with. PA-RISC 8900 will be HP's last PA-RISC processor.

Power consortium (the group that design the Power Processor), consist of Apple, Motorola and IBM. It was a good idea at that time. They were responsible for 68 000 processor from Motorola and the Power 3 processor from IBM. However, it shows it crack in 2000 till 2003. Motorola was interested in the embedded space and IBM was interested in the high-end, high reliable processors. This left Apple with a G4 processor that was stuck at 1GHz for a VVVVVvvvveeerrrrrryyyyyyyy long time while Intel and AMD zoom pass it with 2GHz processors. Its not to say the G4 was a bad processor, it is because Motorola was not interested in producing a more powerful G4 to cater for a small market. They were adapting the G4 for communication and other embedded devices... Imagine they are selling 100 million G4's @ 300 to 400MHz with 1 or 2 Watts power consumption vs 5 million for G4's @ 1GHz...

Ontop of that, the G4's was a horrible processor to scale up.. the G4's pipeline had to be streched to 7 stage from its original 4 stage to get 1Ghz and above. Ontop of that the Altivac was a big baggage that drag the G4 processor's speed. It was too complex to make it run faster then 1GHz (in 2002-2003 anyway). In the process do note that Apple was flirting with IBM to produce faster G4 processors too.

Than came along the Power 4 and the 970 processors from IBM. Apple bid Motorola farewell and hop into bed with IBM. IBM took out the 970 processor, cut down on the cache, make it leaner and slimmer, slap a castrated Altivec unit, called it G5 and scale up the processor to 2GHz in 1 year. Pretty impressive. Finally Apple had a processor that is able to compete with intel's 3Ghz processor and AMD's Athlon XP processors. It was all good until the 0.09 micron process is giving IBM a lot of headache. The next jump was 2.5GHz processor. I have a felling that it is pumping out more then Intel's 3.2GHz processor at maximum usage. I know Apple quoted 45Watts but that's on average useage. AMD and Intel quote its Maximum power dissipation. Thats why Apple made the new G5 with water cooling.

Now SPARC... pretty much run out of steam in 1998 and 1999. IBM, Intel and AMD has been slapping it silly since then. Sun is currently running at 1GHz for ages with its US-III processor and is still selling its US-IIi processor at 500MHz to 700MHz in their low end machine. Thank god Scott McNally(spelling?) wised up, knowing that they couldn't compete with IBM, Intel and AMD in the high-end space and cut off the Ultra Sparc IV and concentrate their resources to accelerate the web server processing. Integrated IP/TCP processing on the processor, simple, low power, efficient, Encryption on chip, and lets not forget scalability on their up coming Niagara processor. I don't expect it to be a SPEC monster but I wouldn't be surprise if it could be the ULTIMATE W3B L33T H4X0R processor... err... i mean the best web server chip out there.

So how is Sun surviving all this time? for one, they have a huge customer base with thier server. Its easier to take an old application and move to a newer Sun machine rather than porting it to an intel machine. Next, in their server, you could actually plug out a processor from the mother board WHILE it is still running! I've heard first hand account where a car crash through a Sun server room damage the SUN Fire server (there was 128 processors in it), and it is still running perfectly. The only reason that the administrator suspected that something was wrong with their server was because it was running at ½ its speed. Now that deserves some respect! They are also the only company that provides scaleable system up to 1024 processors for a commercial server. Not even IBM can do it.

Okay so did i miss out anything? Well Intel's story you guys know it already.. so i can't be bothered writing about it. Anyway feel free to fix up some errors for me.. This was done on top of my head. Hence there's no link for what I've written

Geez nUtZ`, hope you didn't burn your breakfast.

Well, MIPS processors are alive and well in the embedded space. A MIPS R10000 variant powers the Playstation 2. Off the top of my head, Toshiba, NEC and IDT make MIPS architecture based microcontrollers and general purpose microprocessors. Toshiba in particular used their MIPS based chips in their PDAs, until they switched over to using Intel StrongARM. These days they're probably more likely to be found in stuff like network routers, packet switchers, VOIP terminals, etc.

Lots of people prefered the Motorola 680x0 series processors over Intel's 16/32-bit offerings. It's been used in at least 3 successful PC platforms (Apple Mac, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST), video game consoles (Super Nintendo, Sega Megadrive/Genesis), countless arcade games( Street Fighter II, SNK NeoGeo ). Even with all that success, they were still unable to take down Intel. Motorola, or Freescale as their semiconductor arm is called now are now fully entrenched in the embedded market though. The 68000 family is being continued by the ColdFire series, but I think they're not doing as well as their ARM based Dragonball processors.

x86, IDT WinChip.

Hey I don't think SGI manufactures MIPS chips right? They just make use of the MIPS chips, AFAIK ... The Alpha was originally developed by DEC, later bought by Compaq, who in turn was bought by HP

BTW, Pentium 4 F-types are coming out soon hehe ... I wonder how the 64-bit performance of that CPU will be against the AMD64s ...

In 5 years time, you'll be left with:

x86 - Intel, AMD, Via
Power - IBM? Motorola where?
EPIC - Intel
SPARC - Fujitsu, Sun
ARM- Intel?

actually in 5 years time, i hope Malaysia got its own processor , and i dont think Motorola going to let IBM powered the POWER

mitodna

why is it that they need to increase the pipeline lenght to get mor GHz?

Increase pipeline = Less work that needs to be done at each stage of the processing pipeline... Less work means it will finish the task faster. So the overall clockspeed would increase (more GHz).

yeah, Motorola i.MX series a big leap from Dragonball series

IBM also manufactured for AMD, nVidia, but the G5..., do have heat problem too and low production level i think, though with SOI

mitodna

This post has been edited by mitodna: Aug 16 2004, 12:27 AM

ARM = Acorn Risc Machines... i think

I thought AMD 0.09 is R&D with IBM?

How about 6502 used by Apple computer ? Is it Zilog that made 6502 ?

i think ARM processors are used with n-gage and QD's also, 104Mhz, enough to run 3d games, or bench with the SP mark 2004

that's the old Mac II its about the same speed as 286.. its still a CISC processor too.. apple didn't make a move to PowerPC till 1986-87... i think the 6502 is made by motorola

no Zilog made the Z80

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Z80/

ARM is used in a variety of applications.. from your network switch to your PDA.. its competing with MIPS in the embedded space right now.

IBM has the technology... AMD needs to modify its design to be able to manufacture with IBM tech. A change in the transistor width will cause a whole lot of problem with layout and signal propagation.

So IBM pretty much manufactures a whole lot of the processors.