This document is intended to provide an idea of who preceded (and superseded) who. Please use the contact page for comments, corrections, and so on. I originally wrote this for Everything2.
The Seventies
The seventies were a good time for intel, mostly because they were the first players in the game. Motorola jumped in rapidly thereafter, however, and brought out the ubiquitous 6800 and later the arguably even more important 68000 during the same timeframe. Even today, however, 808x CPUs are more popular in embedded systems than the more powerful Motorola 68000, if for no other reason than inertia. Intel got there first, and got the ball rolling. A great deal of their installed base comes from the fact that the IBM PC and every clone of it thereafter carried an intel CPU. IBM also delivered the first commercial RISC CPU during this decade, sort of.
1971: 4004 (intel) Used in the Busicom calculator. First microprocessor. 4 bits, 2300 transistors, 740 kHz, 0.06 MIPS.
1972: 8008 (intel) First 8-bit microprocessor, used in the Mark-8.
1974: 8080 (intel) Second 8-bit microprocessor, used in the Altair 8800.
1974: MC6800 (Motorola) Easier to implement than intel 8080 as it needs only one voltage and no support chips to operate. Mostly sold for peripheral and industrial control.
1975: MC6501 (MOS) Pin-compatible with Motorola MC6800, leading to a lawsuit against MOS.
1975: MC6502 (MOS) Replaces the 6501, and is not pin-compatible with MC6800. Used in Apple 2 and Commodore VIC 20. MOS Technology was purchased by Commodore later the same year.
1976: 8085 (intel) Improved version of the 8080; uses only +5V, where 8080 needs several voltages, and with additional instructions as well. Used in some home computers like TRS-80 Model 100.
1976: TMS9900 (TI) First 16 bit microprocessor. Used in the TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A.
1976: Z80 (Zilog) The Z80's instruction set is a superset of the intel 8080. It becomes one of the most ubiquitous embedded processors of all time. The de facto standard for computers running CP/M. Also featured in the Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Nintendo Game Boy, among many other computers and devices.
1978: 8086 (intel) Also in the same year, the complementary 8087 math coprocessor.
1979: 8088 (intel) Cost-reduced 8086, with an 8 bit bus instead of 16 bit. Used in the IBM PC because it was cheaper. 8086 and 8088 are the ancestors of all PC processors, at least in some spirit.
1979: 801 (IBM) IBM's first RISC CPU. Used as accessory processor for some IBM products and became the basis of ROMP.
1979: Z8000 (Zilog) 16 bit chip which powered many early UNIX computers.
1979: MC68000 (Motorola) 16 bit internal and external data bus, 24 bit addressing, 32 bit instruction set. An enduring design that lives on decades later in embedded applications which was the basis of Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, Apollo, Sun, and countless other brands of computer, and with multiple generations of successors.
The Eighties
The 1980s, "the digital age." This is when the popularity of personal computing exploded. All of the chips we love (and love to hate) or their direct predecessors were born here -- the Intel 80286 (possibly intel's most crippled chip in its time); the Motorola 68020 (first 32 bit processor), ARM (including the first marketed RISC processor), The 386 and 486 which brought PCs into the 32 bit era, and RISC products from Sun (Sparc), MIPS (R3000), and IBM (ROMP).
The beginning of this decade is also when the first clones of intel CPUs began to appear: NEC brought out the V20 and V30, which are drop-in replacements. The prior Zilog Z80 (1976) executed intel 8080 instructions, but was not a direct replacement for the 8080.
1981: RISC I, first research implementation from the Berkeley RISC project implementing the concept which dominates computing today.
1981: 80186 and 80188 (Intel) x86-compatible, primarily used in embedded systems but also in some early PCs.
1982: 80286 (intel) Used in the IBM PC-AT. First x86 processor without multiplexed data and address buses. 16 bit data, 24 bit address, 16MB address space. Most PCs used this processor until the early 1990s. (February 1, 1982)
1982: MC68010 (Motorola) Update of MC68000 which supports virtualization and virtual memory.
1984: MC68020 (Motorola) The world's first commercial "true" 32-bit microprocessor, with all buses 32 bit and 32 bit instructions, and the first 68k processor with an instruction cache. Two FPUs and a PMMU were offered.
1984: V20 and V30 (NEC) First pin-and-object code compatible clones of intel's 8088 and 8086, respectively. Intel sued over microcode used in these processors and lost.
1985: ARM1 and ARM2 (Acorn) ARM2 was the first commercial RISC design available in a personal computer. ARM1 is also RISC, but never made it to market.
1985: R2000 (MIPS) First commercially available MIPS processor and implementation of Stanford's MIPS project (competitor to Berkeley's RISC.) MIPS 1 instruction set.
1986: 80386/i386 (intel). x86 goes 32 bit and adds an on-chip MMU with "protected mode", making PC processors serious.
1986: ROMP (IBM) Second commercially available fully RISC processor family, used in the unsuccessful IBM RT PC which typically ran AIX. Technical successor of IBM 801 and predecessor of IBM POWER.
1986: SPARC (Sun, LSI Logic, Fujitsu) SPARC Version 7 (first release.) SPARC is based on the concepts of Berkeley RISC, plus even more registers.
1987: MC68030 (Motorola) 32 bit processor with 32 bit address bus which quickly replaced MC68020 due to offering a bit more performance at the same price.
1988: R3000 (MIPS) 32 bit RISC processor, still MIPS 1. Used in SGI systems, and among many other things, the original Sony Playstation.
1988: 80386SX (intel) Cheaper alternative to the 386DX, it uses a 16 bit time-multiplexed bus to perform 32 bit data transfers (in two cycles) at a cost in memory bandwidth. (June 16, 1988)
1989: 80486DX (intel) New 32 bit processor, and the last Intel-made x86 processor that is not internally RISCy. (April 10, 1989)
1989: i860 (intel) System-on-a-chip with a 32 bit processor which was both RISC and VLIW, with 64 bit data types and an integrated graphics accelerator (today known as a GPU) which performed texturing and shading. The original target for Windows NT and in fact the place from which that operating system derived its name.
1989: ARM3 (Acorn)
The Nineties
This is where home computers began to really have the "juice" to wow people. The MIPS R4000 fueled high-end Unix workstations which were busy making movies. IBM and Motorola got together and with input from Apple began work on and realized their new PowerPC architecture. Intel brought out the Pentium followed by the Pentium MMX, Pentium 2, and the Pentium 3, and all were huge hits.
AMD got into the high-power game with several internally RISC CPUs which would interpret x86 instructions: K5, K6, and K7 or "Athlon." The Athlon got them into a serious battle with intel over CPU supremacy, which pretty much brings us to our current situation - Everyone making a significant CPU today has enough power to stay in the race.
1990: POWER1 (IBM) RS/6000 POWER architecture chip, and predecessor of PowerPC CPU, sort of since there is one chip which is effectively both, MPC601. POWER1 is multi-chip, 2-way superscalar, out-of-order, and uses register renaming.
1990: MC68040 (Motorola) successor to the MC68030 offered with on-chip FPU. The last popular member of the 68000 line.
1991: Am386 (AMD) 80386 clone which broke the Intel 32 bit x86 monopoly.
1991: R4000 (MIPS) First commercial 64 bit processor.
1991: 486SX (Intel) 486 processor with no onboard FPU. Introduced as a low-cost budget processor; originals are remarked 486DX chips with FPUs disabled, it was removed entirely from later versions. (April 22, 1991)
1992: MCP601 (IBM) First-generation PowerPC chip, aka Motorola PowerPC 601. Motorola will also begin to make them in 1993. This is the only PowerPC chip to implement the full (at the time) POWER instruction set.
1992: Alpha 21064 (Digital) 64 bit processor, considered to be one of the fastest chips for floating point mathematics in its day. Concepts from Alpha were later used by AMD in the K7.
1992: SuperSPARC I (Sun, Texas Instruments) First multi-scalar RISC chip with SMP capability, support for 1-2MB L2 cache. Used in SparcStation 10 and 20.
1992: microSPARC I (Sun, Texas Instruments) Cost-Shrunk integrated SuperSPARC I for lower-end systems.
1993: Pentium (intel) Intel begins to use some RISC style processing for x86. First superscalar x86-family processor.
1993: Am486 (AMD) Faster, cheaper 80486-compatible processor.
1993: POWER2 (IBM) Second generation POWER architecture (Developed alongside MCP601)
1993: PowerPC 603 (IBM and Motorola) Drops some POWER architecture features which were in the 601, but runs significantly faster.
1993: R4400 and R4600 (MIPS) Larger-cache R4000. R4600 is a speed-bumped part.
1993: hyperSPARC (Ross) SPARC Version 9, higher-speed/performance SPARC part with a snazzy blue heat sink on the modules.
1993: SPARC POWER μP (Weitek) Clock-doubled SPARC upgrade part for SparcStation 2s and SparcStation IPXs.
1994: PowerPC 604 and 620 (IBM). 604 is the first out-of-order PowerPC. 620 is also OoO, and the first 64 bit PowerPC. 620 was supposed to be launched a year earlier and died in the market when the cheaper improved 604e came out in 1996.
1994: R8000 (MIPS, Toshiba, Weitek) First superscalar MIPS design, used by SGI and featured in 10% of the Top500 in 1994.
1994: MC68060 (Motorola) Last entry in the 680x0 line, a very RISC-ish 32 bit processor with "2 to 3 times the performance capability of the 68040 at the same clockrate." Similar to the Pentium, upstaged by the cheaper and faster PowerPC 603e.
1995: Am586 (AMD) Souped-up 486 stopgap product at 133 MHz, and AMD's last CISC PC processor.
1995: Pentium Pro (intel) Long-pipelined x86-compatible processor with out-of-order, speculative execution and high-ish clock rates (200 MHz) and double the cache of earlier x86 processors.
1995: SPARC64 (HAL/Fujitsu) First 64-bit SPARC processor.
1995: SuperSparc 2 (Sun)
1995: UltraSPARC I (Sun) 64-bit, 4-way superscalar in-order SPARC processor, introduces crossbar architecture ("UPA").
1995: StrongARM (ARM+Digital) ARM v4 RISC processor intended for embedded systems, somewhat based on the ARM architecture. Owned by Digital, who got bought by Compaq, who sold StrongARM to Intel.
1995: R10000 (MIPS) Family of four-way superscalar, out of order processors used by some later SGI and HP machines, with speeds up to 1 GHz.
1996: R5000 (MIPS) Budget (compared to R10000) CPU designed for 3D applications.
1996: K5 (AMD) AMD's first Internally-RISC x86-compatible processor. Intended to compete with the Pentium. Late to the market and never available in numbers, it was clobbered when the Pentium MMX came out. (March 27, 1996)
1997: Pentium MMX P55C (Intel) Pentium with (MMX) (Intel-branded SIMD) added.
1997: Pentium 2 (Intel) Based on the Pentium Pro, and carrying the MMX features of the P55C. First x86 processor on a module, bundled with L2 cache on the PC board. (All prior x86 CPUs utilize L2 cache on the motherboard.)
1997: K6 (AMD) Their first Pentium 2 competitor, based on a RISC design with an x86 translation layer. Suffers due to slow and semi-incompatible (24 as opposed to 32 bit) FPU. (April 2, 1997)
1997: UltraSPARC II (Sun et al.) Significantly higher clockrate 64-bit SPARC V9.
1998: Pentium 2 Xeon (Intel) Where the P2's L2 cache runs at half speed, the Xeon's runs at full speed, and is available from 512kb to 8mb.
1998: Pentium 2 Deschutes (Intel) Process shrink to .25µm.
1998: PowerPC 7xx (AKA G3) (Apple, IBM and Motorola) Used in the Power Macintosh G3, this brought Apple into the nineties in performance in a real way.
1998: K6-2 (AMD) Updated version of K6 CPU with multimedia functions ("3DNow!") and a 32-bit FPU. Solves compatibility problems and gives much better performance. (May 28, 1998)
1999: Celeron (Intel) Bargain version of the Pentium 2. Early versions have no L2 cache; Later versions have a reduced amount of L2 (128kb) which runs at full speed rather than the P2's half speed.
1999: Pentium 3 (Intel) Based on the P2's design, updated core. Substantially but not dramatically faster than P2. Adds additional SIMD extensions beyond MMX. No one knows this yet, but close descendants of this same core will be Intel's bread and butter for decades.
1999: Athlon/K7 (AMD) AMD's competitor to Pentium 3, which is significantly faster and still slightly cheaper. Features 100MHz DDR bus from the Alpha (licensed from DEC) for three times the bus bandwidth of Intel CPUs (compared to the then-current 66MHz Pentium 2/3 bus.) Intel Pentium 2/3 chipsets later feature 100MHz bus (non-DDR.) This
1999: PowerPC G4 line (IBM and Motorola) Very performant PowerPC processor with support for SMP and vector processing, used to good effect by Apple in this era.
1999: K6-3 (AMD) Last revision in K6 line, improves speed of multimedia functions and makes new clock rates available. If you have binaries compiled to take advantage of this processor, it outstrips a Pentium 3 clock for clock... but you usually don't. This chip also has 256kB L2 cache onboard, and any L2 cache on the motherboard becomes L3 cache, a first for x86-compatible PCs. This can actually make a substantial difference, especially if you have a board supporting and equipped with 512kB.
The Oughts
Or whatever you would like to call them
In the 21st century the race between AMD and intel continued. They had approximately equivalent performance juggernauts which for the first time (Beginning in the 90s with the coexistence of Pentium 3 and Athlon) compete directly and strongly with one another. Meanwhile, both companies have 64 bit designs with instruction sets based on x86, and the outcome of that match is as unclear as the outcome of Pentium 4 vs. Athlon XP.
Meanwhile everyone else has also already gone 64 bit (MIPS, Sparc) or is about to go 64 bit (PowerPC). The 21st century finally brings the age of the quad word.
2000: Pentium 4 (Intel) Less efficient than P3 cycle for cycle, with a harsher penalty for incorrect branch prediction (due to a longer pipeline), but supports much higher clock rates (mostly due to the longer pipeline.) Bus speeds increase to as much as 533MHz in order to compete with AMD's Athlon.
2000: Athlon XP and MP (AMD) Full speed L2 cache, and a new 133MHz DDR bus (equivalent to 266MHz.) MP is "designed" for multiprocessor use.
2000: Crusoe TM5400 and TM5600 (Transmeta). Crusoe is a "code-morphing" processor which uses dynamic JIT recompilation (in the form of a software translator) to run code designed for x86 on a VLIW core.
2001: itanium (Intel) Intel's first 64 bit CPU. Low clock rates (through 2002) but true 64 bit. Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) which is a form of VLIW. Uses a new instruction set, IA-64, which not is based on x86. Extremely slow at emulating x86, but Intel sells this as a feature anyway. They promise a magic compiler which (spoiler alert) never arrives.
2001: Crusoe TM5500 and TM5800 (Transmeta) Bigger Transmeta CPUs. They wind up in a few laptops but though battery life is good, performance is only ever mediocre and they never catch on.
2001: UltraSPARC III (Sun et al.)
2002: itanium 2 (Intel) Supports higher clock rates than itanium and has a shorter pipeline to reduce the cost of a bad branch prediction. Still expensive and slow, and (spoiler alert) AMD takes the market in another direction in another year.
2002: XScale (Intel) StrongARM II. ARMv5 processors descended from StrongARM. The fastest ARM processors around at the time, with speeds up to 1 GHz. Intel can get them to scale up in performance but not down in power and the line is sold to Marvell in 2006, after which Intel will stick with x86 (and their version of amd64) for at least twenty years.
2002: R16000 (SGI) MIPS 4 architecture, 64KB L1 and 4MB L2 cache, and with out-of-order execution (OoO.) End of the line for the classic MIPS processors, used in SGI and HP machines. Speeds up to 1 GHz.
2002: SPARC64 V (Fujitsu) Designed for servers and later used for HPC.
2003: Opteron/Athlon 64 (AMD) AMD extends x86 to 64 bit with an instruction set called x86-64, with processors collectively named K8 or "Hammer". Opteron has more cache and two HyperTransport links per CPU than Athlon 64, allowing for glue-less SMP; Athlon 64 has just one link which goes to the chipset. Hammer has an on-chip memory controller and uses NUMA architecture.
2003: PowerPC 970/G5 (IBM) 64 bit PowerPC processor derived from POWER4. The G5 in the Power Macintosh is the 970. This is actually something of a monster and gives the opportunity for a nice swan song for PowerPC in the Power Macintosh, though it's marred somewhat by leaking liquid coolers.
2003: Pentium M (Intel) This low-power rehash of the Pentium 3 processor formerly code-named Banias became the first Intel Core processor, specifically Yonah. Sometimes mistakenly called Centrino.
2004: POWER5 (IBM) 64 bit POWER processor.
2004: Athlon XP-M (AMD) Low-power version of the Athlon XP processor, the slowest ("2700+") part draws 35W with 512kB L2 cache.
2004: UltraSPARC IV (Sun et al.) First 64 bit dual-core processor.
2005: Athlon 64 X2 (AMD) First dual-core 64 bit x86-compatible processor.
2005: UltraSPARC IV+ (Sun et. al.)
2006: UltraSPARC T1 (Sun et. al.) First 8-core CMT system.
2007: UltraSPARC T2 (Sun et. al.) 8 cores x 8 threads.
New processors were last added to this document in 2007, which is why it ends there. I haven't decided what I'm doing with this list yet. My first inclination is to "complete" it through 2009 and then place only major milestones on the list from there. As always, input is invited.
Additional References:
- Intel Microprocessor Hall of Fame. Intel Corp.(http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/exhibit/hist_micro/hof/hof_main.htm)
- AMD History. AMD. (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/AboutAMD/0,,51_52_533,00.html)
- Webpage: Motorola History. Motorola. (http://www.motorola.com/content/0,1037,115-110,00.html)
- Timeline of Microcomputers. pcbiography.net. (http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/comphist.html)
- 25 Years of the Microprocessor. Thinkquest. (http://library.thinkquest.org/13714/netscape3/time.htm)
- SGIStuff: Processors. Gerhard Lenerz, 2001-2002. (http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/processors.html)
- Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present. John Bayko, March 2002. (http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/jbayko/cpu.html)
- E2Nodes ARM1, ARM2 and ARM3 (Writeups by alisdair)
- E2Node StrongARM (Writeup by call)
- Email from Phillip Bergman of Transmeta, October 25, 2002
- MIPS architecture. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, October 2003. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture)
- Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, Understanding Pipelining and Superscalar Execution. Ars Technica, 2003. (http://www.arstechnica.com/paedia/c/cpu/part-2/cpu2-4.html)
- Halfhill, Tom R., MIPS R5000: fast, Affordable 3-D. Byte Magazine, May 1996, pp 161-162. (Web: http://www.byte.com/art/9605/sec14/art1.htm)
- wlaote, AMD/Intel CPU release date graph. Ace's Hardware Forums, April 26, 2002. (http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?id=65044805&forumid=1)
- "Motorola 68060." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 22 Jun 2006, 07:58 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 30 Jun 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Motorola_68060&oldid=59962992>.
- "Timeline of computing 1990-forward." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 20 Jun 2006, 18:29 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 30 Jun 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_computing_1990-forward&oldid=59666221>.
- "Timeline of computing 1950-1979." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 20 Jun 2006, 14:46 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 30 Jun 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_computing_1950-1979&oldid=59632467>.
- "List of AMD Athlon 64 microprocessors." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 14 Jun 2006, 13:56 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 30 Jun 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_AMD_Athlon_64_microprocessors&oldid=58577038>.
- "The History of SPARC." Sun Microsystems, August 2007. <http://ru.sun.com/news/press/2007/august/SPARC_Timeline_Aug07.pdf>
- Koch(?), Peter. "History of the Sun4 Series." 2008. <http://www.sun4zoo.de/en/history.html>
- Kerekes, Zsolt (ed.) "History of SPARC systems." SPARC Product Directory, June 5, 2008. <http://www.sparcproductdirectory.com/history.html>