
Microchips That Shook the World - amelius
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/25-microchips-that-shook-the-world/0
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gumby
I like that list but am sorry that they didn't include the 7400. A far more
influential part than Transmeta (which I sy despite having many friends who
were at Transmeta).

~~~
setq
Indeed. The TI SN7400N is still in production and can still be bought today:
[http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/standard-logic-gates/0305490/](http://uk.rs-
online.com/web/p/standard-logic-gates/0305490/)

That's only 53 years in production now!

~~~
mcspecter
It's on the runners-up list:
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-
runnersu...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-runnersup-
more-earthshaking-chips)

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stefanpie
Would the Atmel AVR line (such as the ATMega328P or the ATTiny85) count as one
set microchips that shook the world. They played an important role in the rise
of modern hobby electronics such as the Arduino, but I don't know how much
they are used in practical applications.

~~~
kirrent
After reading the article the chips they chose shook the world because of
their silicon, not good tool support like AVR studio and Arduino, which was
what made the Atmegas so popular. The 328 in particular is otherwise a boring
and low powered chip micro, despite its impact on the hobby world.

~~~
manaskarekar
In that case, perhaps the ESP8266/ESP32 qualify?

~~~
duskwuff
Definitely not. Both of those parts are neither old enough, nor influential
enough, to have "shook the world" in any way.

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vparikh
As stated with the 68000 - I often wondered where the industry would be if the
68000 was picked instead of the x86 architecture by IBM. The 68000 had a far
better design and the ISA had real legs. Instead we got stuck with the
monstrosity that is the x86 architecture. Probably put us back a decade or so
I think.

~~~
fulafel
The 68000 did well and was popular (in Macs, Amigas, NeXT / Sun boxes, etc) as
long as ISA mattered. When it faded away, x86 was C-based and 32-bit which
mitigated its weaknesses.

Yes, MS software was terrible, but this had little to do with x86 after the 32
bit transition.

~~~
yuhong
The OS/2 2.0 fiasco is so bad it is one of my favorite topics.

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kqr2
Although it wasn't earth shattering, my personal favorite is the Motorola
MC14500B 1-bit microprocessor:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MC14500B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MC14500B)

~~~
childintime
A fantastic part to theoretically dabble with, but did you actually use it?

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jhallenworld
I'm happy to see the XC2018 FPGA on this list. I remember when they came out,
but at the time I did not realize just how much could be done with simple
logic (I was then interested in bit-slice and microcode), so ignored them. I
did get to use them though since both the 2018 and 2064 were still available
in the mid-90s, even though they were obsolete.

This list is missing RF chips, though I suppose success is from RF technology
on chips, not any single killer chip.

~~~
kalleboo
There are a couple RF-centric chips in the "Runners-up" article
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-
runnersu...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-runnersup-
more-earthshaking-chips)

~~~
russellbeattie
I hadn't seen that the posted article was from 2009 until I read the follow-
up, which talked about how amazing the Cell Processor was. Good thing that
chip didn't make the cut - just eight years after the article was written,
it's pretty obvious the Cell turned out to not be so special or influential.

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flavio81
I wish IEEE had a newspaper! A really great, comprehensive list. Really good
that they have added also the CCD chips and the DLP micro mirrors as well!

~~~
tonyarkles
[http://spectrum.ieee.org](http://spectrum.ieee.org) ?

~~~
flavio81
What I mean is that I wish THEY were the ones who ran one major newspaper and
covered daily news with the same depth and subject-matter insight that they
did in this article. A great article.

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InclinedPlane
This is a really excellent list. It includes a lot of things that are easy to
forget due to how much we've progressed since then but were absolutely hugely
impactful in their day. What I find fascinating is the degree to which we've
come to pretty much master this stuff. A modern smartphone includes analogs of
nearly every single chip in the list or depends on some core element of the
functionality in some way.

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deepnotderp
This is super cool, maybe add Itanium for an example of what failed?

~~~
kabdib
Many interesting chips failed. My favorites:

\- National 32032 CPUs. Basically a VAX-on-a-chip, they were relatively slow
and pretty buggy. (They were one of the processors we considered using in the
Atari ST, but the 68000 won out, thank goodness).

\- INMOS Transputer. One of the early "just apply +5V and ground and happy
computing!" systems with zero support chips needed, quite easy to put into a
grid of compute elements. Very interesting nibble-based instruction set, worth
studying. Unfortunately the high-level language INMOS was pushing (Occam) was
really strange, and Transputer performance was never really great. There were
also some cool microcode bugs (you could lock a Transputer up for minutes by
executing a bit-shift instruction with a very large count).

\- RCA 1802. Another early microprocessor. Not really a _failure_ , but not a
huge success, except for its radiation-hardened variants, which have flown on
many space missions.

\- Just about any floating-point coprocessor chip. Ugh. Thank goodness the
early Pentiums stopped that madness [1].

[1] I heard that Intel wanted to charge for doing floating-point operations on
Pentiums. The idea was that you'd pay to have an "enable" fuse blown, which
would purchase (say) 100M operations before a disable fuse got blown. There'd
be something like 64 fuses, and the last one would enable floating ops
forever. The rationale was that the only people who really cared about
floating point were folks running spreadsheets . . . and those people
obviously had money and would pay for performance! People hated this idea;
then 3D gaming started to be popular (with Quake, et al) and suddenly flops
were in general use and it would have been a _really awful_ marketing move by
Intel.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Transputer lived on partly in Firewire.

~~~
kabdib
I knew about the Transputer links, but didn't know about their relationship to
Firewire. That's pretty neat.

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Sytten
Proof that those chips got us to where we are now, I used most of them during
my Bachelor of Computer Eng. (Recently graduated). Chips like the 555 are
extremely cheap and reliable. You got to start with the basic if you want to
create more complex designs after.

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childintime
My collegue listed a few iconic parts: \- 8051 (first real MCU, how could it
not be on the list?) \- MAXIM 232 (RS232 interface) \- 7805 (voltage
regulator) \- TL431 (...)

