IEEE Micro

Presents the introductory editorial for this issue on the topic of microprocessors.

The articles in this special section focus on the history and future technological development of microprocessors. Microprocessors have become more pervasive than any other landmark invention of the entire human civilization including the wheel, in spite ...

At this landmark event when the microprocessor turns 50, we asked leaders at major microprocessor companies to reflect on this remarkable achievement, their favorite processor, coolest features of microprocessors, or their special personal microprocessor ...

The story starts in February 1968 when I joined Fairchild Semiconductor R&D Lab in Palo Alto, CA, USA. At that time, nearly all the integrated circuits (ICs) in production used bipolar technology. Metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology was up-and-...

The evolution of the microprocessor can be organized into five eras, each distinguished by common trends in the evolution of microprocessors. Most of these eras are around ten years and represent a shift from the previous era. I have had the privilege of ...

From its birth with 4 bits, first stumbling 8-bit steps, no longer an adolescent 16-bit design, and well past the awkward 32-bit age, the microprocessor is finally mature and well into middle age! It is only those of us for whom the Fogey Factor is high ...

AMD has transformed into an industry leader, overcoming decades of challenges that have made the company more competitive. In this article, we offer an overview of the history of AMD microprocessor development, with an insider's look at some of the ...

It was a different computing world in the late 1980s. Many if not most researchers in the computer architecture area had become convinced that complex instruction sets such as the Intel x86 were doomed in light of the many advantages promised by reduced ...

Graphics processing units (GPUs) power today’s fastest supercomputers, are the dominant platform for deep learning, and provide the intelligence for devices ranging from self-driving cars to robots and smart cameras. They also generate compelling ...

There has been an impressive increase in single-chip processing power since the Intel 4004 was launched in 1971. This is usually attributed to Moore's law, but there are additional factors to consider. In understanding the components of prior improvements,...

Much has been written of Arm's inception.1,10 Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber's original Acorn RISC Machine and the ARM1 microarchitecture in 1985. The restructuring into Advanced RISC Machines Ltd in 1990 that saw Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI invest ...

The microprocessor revolution, of which this issue marks the 50th anniversary, drove remarkable innovations in instruction set architecture, microarchitecture, and system design, some of which continue to evolve in current research and commercial ...

Presilicon modeling is a crucial and integral part of processor microarchitecture definition and optimization. In this article, I attempt to provide a retrospective view of IBM's POWER and PowerPC microprocessors, through the lens of someone who has been ...

Over the last 25 years, the use of caches has advanced significantly in mainstream microprocessors to address the memory wall challenge. As we transformed microprocessors from single-core to multicore to manycore, innovations in the architecture, design, ...

Being a 16-year-old kid going to UC Berkeley right before the 1960s was not conducive to academic success. That was my situation: Having graduated from high school early with no strong academic motivation, being immature, and with the distractions of Cal, ...

To understand the impact of microprocessors and controllers one must dial back 50 years to when the computing machine that was most often seen was the store point-of-sale cash registers, which were popularized by the NCR Corporation. In the early 1960s, ...

The late 1980s saw the beginnings of the System-on-Chip (SoC). One of the first true SoCs was the MC68332 from Motorola, Inc. In this chip, Motorola demonstrated simplified SoC integration with standardized physical and electrical interfaces. It was ...

Renesas Electronics has a long history of providing high-quality and reliable microcontrollers to the automotive industry for many years. Renesas is the consolidation of the semiconductor units of Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC Electronics. Hitachi and ...

In the current frenzy to connect everything to the cloud from blenders to toothbrushes and everything in between, the Internet of Things (IoT) world is dominated by low-cost, integrated 32-bit microcontroller radio-frequency (RF) modules that provide ...

With advances in device technologies, design methodologies, and programming paradigms, microprocessors of today have undergone a complete metamorphosis compared to their predecessors from the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, heterogeneity has become an all-...

In an industry, where purported breakthroughs become fads and then rapidly fade away, very long instruction word (VLIW) technology has had a long and exceptionally successful life. Conceived by Joseph A. (Josh) Fisher more than 35 years ago,1 VLIW had ...

Reports on the history, development, and applications supported by Texas Instrument's digital signal processor. In the 1970s, Texas Instruments was an early player in the microprocessor industry. Its initial success as the microprocessor inside the ...

In their 2018 Turing Award lecture and 2019 paper, John Hennessy and David Patterson reviewed computer architecture progress since the 1960s. They projected a second golden age akin to the first, approximately 1986–1996, when new instruction set ...

During the early history of microprocessors, benchmarks were of interest to customers and important to marketing, but results and methods were not comparable. For example, a 1985 Performance SummaryaaThe 1985 Performance Summary is the third edition of a ...

Reports on the technology of microprocessors, focusing on the history and development of the DEC Alpha 21164.

Reports on the history, development, and applications supported by Motorola's microprocessor product line.

Reports on the developent and applications supported by multicore processors.

Reports on the development of the microprocessor and discusses the launching and operations of the IBM 370 mainframe.

Reports on the design and development of Texas Instrument's (x86) Pentium-successor-class chip product line. In the mid-1990s, Texas Instruments (TI) set about designing a (x86) Pentium-successor-class chip targeted at capturing a big chunk of the ...

Reports on the history, development, and applications supported by Zilog Z80 microprocessor. The history of Zilog Z80 is fascinating. According to reliable sources,1 in late 1974, Federico Faggin, who was then best known as the designer of the first ...