
Microchips That Shook the World (2009) - nynyny7
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/25-microchips-that-shook-the-world
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ableal
That's a good overview, and it made me think of a parallel list of chips that
got quite a lot of press but did not shake the world much after all.

Off the cuff, Intel would have two solid entries with the iAPX 432 and the
Itanium, there's probably some Lisp machine and putative 'Japanese 5th gen
computer' silicon to add, and maybe the Transmeta Crusoe could have honors in
both lists ...

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pinewurst
I'd argue that the Itanium did "shake the world" due to the vast hype. In a
sense it killed the server RISC processors (MIPS, SPARC, HP-PA) because the
competition was so afraid of what Intel could bring to bear.

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rbanffy
I lost count of how many ARMs I saw doing the job of 555's...

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rasz
To be fair microcontroller price is nowadays mainly influenced by packaging
cost and profit margin. You can buy microcontrollers that are cheaper than
555, and its easier to find code monkey than competent EE able to design
analog circuits.

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bunnycorn
Great selection, great article. The only one I find missing would be the GPU
of Nvidia's 8800 graphics card, I belive it was the first GPU that could be
used for GPGPU. (Correct me if I'm wrong).

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opencl
Sort of. The Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360 was the first with a unified shader
architecture but the 8800 was indeed the first one for PC.

If you want to get a little more pedantic, GPGPU has been around in some form
as long as programmable shaders have by (ab)using graphics APIs. But unified
shaders made it a lot more flexible/useful/less hacky and were definitely the
start of modern GPGPU efforts.

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perl4ever
"Camenzind was working as a consultant to Signetics, a local semiconductor
firm. The economy was tanking. He was making less than US $15 000 a year and
had a wife and four children at home."

$15,000 in the summer of 1970 is equivalent to about $97,000 today.

