Who are the Computer Architects?

last updated: February 2017

1. Considerations about the list
2. Supercomputer processors
3. VLIW processors
4. Independence architecture processors (Intel IA-64)
5. Mainframe processors
6. Minisupercomputer processors
7. Minicomputer and Superminicomputer processors (16 and 32-bit)
8. Microcomputer processors
9. Workstation processors (32 and 64-bit)
10. Selected early workstations
11. Wintel processors (16 and 32-bit)
12. Multimedia processors
13. LISP processors
14. Java processors
15. Other language-directed processors
16. Stack processors
17. Embedded processors
18. DSP processors
19. Selected game processors
20. Acknowledgements
21. Revision history

Considerations about the list

The success and failure of high risk computer developments can quite often be traced to a single individual. It is not accidental that unique persons such as Gene Amdahl, Seymour Cray, Fred Brooks, and Bob Barton have become recognized leaders in the computer architecture and design field. Their reputations did not arise from a happy coincidence of being associated with a successful project; rather, they stand out because of their ability to generate a system wide concept, determine a course of action to get it implemented, make the necessary tradeoffs and finally drive through all obstacles to ensure completion of their vision.

Neil Lincoln, CDC (from "It's really not as much fun building a supercomputer as it is simply inventing one," 1977)

There is no doubt that Lincoln named four of the most influential computer architects of the 1950s and 1960s. However, as a more recent architect told me, people outside the design circles (sometimes even meaning company executives) have bought into a myth: "in the '60s, Computer Architecture Giants Walked The Earth, and we pathetic lame-o descendants aren't fit to carry their slide rules." I agree that it is a myth. It shouldn't be the case that just Amdahl, Cray, Brooks, and Barton are recognized as giants in computer architecture and everyone else today is a midget. There are many tremendously gifted people at work in instruction set design and especially microarchitecture; so, I am publishing this list to identify them and recognize their work.

The current format is a listing of an instruction set architecture (ISA) and its architect(s), followed by implementations of that ISA and the associated microarchitect(s)/designer(s). The processors I am listing have been available for sale commercially, and in most instances, I have categorized the processors by company. Although I may extend the list back into and before the 1970s, the current list mainly includes late 1980s and 1990s ISAs and microprocessor implementations. I especially want to highlight the high-performance (i.e., high-risk) implementations.

However, I approach this task recognizing several limitations of the list:

• The list may leave someone out and/or perhaps lead to disagreement over the amount of someone's contribution. I apologize in advance for mistakes and omissions.
• There are many excellent academic and industrial researchers in computer architecture who have greatly influenced the design of current processors but who have not served as the lead designer of a specific ISA or chip. I leave their recognition to another list.
• I probably should do more to highlight a distinction made to me by John Mashey. For some designs, there is a "clear architect who is THE driving force" (perhaps even two people). In other designs, there might be a team of people involved, and the architect has more of a role of "collecting things together and being the editor of the architecture document". In the later case, the success of an architecture can really be credited to the wise assembly of different expertise. I hope that listings of architecture teams will convey some of this distinction.
• I will leave many innovative processor designs that did not make it to completion and market to footnotes or to another list (e.g., see the Dead Supercomputer Society).
• There are many interesting computer systems that are based on existing processors (e.g., Cray T3E using Alpha processors, SGI Origin using MIPS R10000 processors). I am not listing the system designers, but they are truly computer architects, too.
• Finally, Tim Leonard pointed out that architecture management in a new implementation of an existing instruction set architecture is a non-trivial task. Maintaining compatibility and ensuring that an implementation meets a spec requires new methods and processes that are also significant contributions to computer architecture. ("With the S/360, IBM defined and distinguished between architecture, implementation, and realization. Afterward, every architecture needed a spec, a process for interpreting and revising the spec, and verification tools for testing compatibility. The S/360 Principles of Operation set the standard for subsequent ISA specs. Digital's VAX Architecture Exerciser (AXE) set a new high for methods of verifying compatibility.")

I would appreciate help in the form of your corrections, additions, and other suggestions. I am especially interested in published articles of these kinds:

• The history of a design, especially as it names the design team members and their roles. Articles that contain interviews with the architects and that go beyond "marketing talk" would be excellent.
• What was learned from the successes and especially from the "mistakes" in a given design. (Yale Patt attempted to gather this kind of material in the January 1989 special issue of IEEE Computer: "Real Machines: Design Choices/Engineering Tradeoffs".)

I know of three books that help describe the environment and decision-making constraints (e.g., politics) facing an architect:

• Charles Bashe, Lyle Johnson, John Palmer, and Emerson Pugh. IBM's Early Computers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.
• Emerson Pugh, Lyle Johnson, and John Palmer. IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• Tracy Kidder. The Soul of a New Machine. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1981. [story of the Data General MV/8000]

Harwood Kolsky wrote an excellent analysis of the problems in the IBM Stretch project. His observations, written in 1961, about problems such as a committee compromising and including competing proposals in a single design and such as making design decisions without proper cost and performance evaluation, remain relevant 50 years later!

Robert Yung's PhD dissertation, "Evaluation of a Commercial Microprocessor," UC Berkeley, SMLI TR-98-65, June 1998, describes the design decisions for the UltraSPARC microprocessor. Chapter 3 of his dissertation discusses design principles and pitfalls, and Chapter 6 discusses lessons learned with respect to design methodologies, business decisions, and technology considerations.

More recently, Bob Colwell has discussed some of his experiences at Intel in the 1990s while working on the Intel P6 and early phases of the Pentium 4 in Things CPU Architects Need To Think About (abstract), Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory, EE380 Colloquium Series, Feb. 18, 2004. [available on the web, Windows Media, 80+ mins.] Bob has also written a book describing his experiences, mainly from a project manager perspective, called The Pentium Chronicles, IEEE-CS/Wiley-Interscience, 2006, and in 2009 was interviewed by Paul Edwards for an oral history (164 pp pdf).

Also, some articles that describe the design and verification process include:

• Matt Reilly, "Designing an Alpha Processor," IEEE Computer, July 1999, pp. 27-34.
• Chuck Moore, "Getting It Right," IEEE Micro, March/April 2003.
• Chuck Moore, "Managing the Transition from Complexity to Elegance: Knowing When You Have a Problem," IEEE Micro, Sept./Oct. 2003.
• Chuck Moore, "Managing the Transition from Complexity to Elegance: Design Convergence," IEEE Micro, Jan./Feb. 2004.

Mark Smotherman

See also the list of machine designs admired by computer architects.

Supercomputer processors

... much more to do!

Astronautics

• Astronautics ZS-1 (Decoupled Architecture), 1987 - Jim Smith

Control Data Corporation (CDC)

• 6600, 1964 - Seymour Cray (project lead) and Jim Thornton (CPU)
  • nucleus of early team consisted of Seymour Cray, Jim Thornton, Les Davis, Dean Raush, Garner McCrossen, and Paul Kristensen
  • Cray - led PPU and memory system designs
  • Thornton and Davis - led CPU design
  • Cray and McCrossen - led software design, including a FORTRAN compiler and simple OS
  • Jim Thornton, "The CDC 6600 Project," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 2, no. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1980, pp. 338-348. (on-line abstract)
  • Jim Thornton, Design Of A Computer - The Control Data 6600, Scott, Foresman and Co., 1970. (on-line copy of book, 18 MB pdf)
  • Gordon Bell's talk on Cray
  • "Reminiscences of computer architecture and computer design at Control Data Corporation," oral history interview at CBI, moderated by Neil R. Lincoln, 1975
• 7600, 1969 - Seymour Cray
• 8600 (cancelled)
• Cyber 70/170 (continuation of 6600/7600 line)
• Cyber 180/990 - Ron Hintz (chief architect)
  • Tom Lane, Jim Smith, ...
  • used branch prediction and "conditional issue" (i.e., speculative execution) [first use of two-bit counter for branch history?]
• Star-100, 1974 - Jim Thornton
• Cyber-205, 1980 (redesign of Star-100)

Cray Research (CRI)

• Cray-1, 1976 - Seymour Cray (architect), Lester Davis (chief engineer)
  • Richard Russell, "The CRAY-1 computer system", CACM, January 1978, pp. 63-72
  • Gordon Bell's talk on Cray
  • Charles J. Murray, "The ultimate team player," Design News, March 6, 1995 [article on Lester Davis]
• X-MP, 1982 - Steve Chen
  • M. August, G. Brost, C. Hsiung, and A. Schiffleger, "Cray X-MP: The Birth of a Supercomputer," IEEE Computer, January 1989, pp. 45-54.
• Cray-2, 1985 - Seymour Cray
• Y-MP, 1988
• C90, 1990
• T3D, 1993 (MPP, using DEC Alpha processors)
• T3E, 1995

[Seymour Cray left CDC in 1972 to found CRI. He left CRI in 1989 to found CCC. CRI merged with SGI in 1996. A separate Cray Research business unit was later created by SGI in 1999 and sold to Tera in 2000. Tera renamed itself as Cray, Inc.]

Cray Computer (CCC)

• Cray-3, 1993 - Seymour Cray
• "What's all this About Gallium Arsenide?" Cray keynote at Supercomputing '88 (video)
• Cray-4 - Seymour Cray

[CCC started in 1989 and closed in 1995. Seymour Cray founded SRC in 1996.]

Fuji Film

• FUJIC, 1956 - Okazaki Bunji (first Japanese electronic computer)

Fujitsu

• FACOM 230-75 APU, 1977 - Osamu Miwa
• VP100 and VP200, 1983
• VP400, 1986 - Keiichiro Uchida
• VP2000, 1990 - Yuji Oinaga
• VPP500, 1993 - Moriyuki Takamura
• VPP5000, 1999 - Yuji Oinaga

Hitachi

• HITAC M-1801 AP, 1978
• HITAC S-810, 1983
• HITAC S-820, 1988
• HITAC S-3800, 1993

NEC

• SX-1 and SX-2, 1985
• SX-3, 1989
• SX-3R, 1992

Supercomputer Systems, Inc. (SSI)

• SS-1, 1988-1993 (cancelled) - Steve Chen (see US patent 5,197,130)

SiCortex

• ICE9, 2005 - Jud Leonard
  • six-core SOC design with each core having in-order issue of up to two MIPS-64 instructions
  • the SOC also had a shared coherent L2 cache, DMA engine, two memory controllers, network switch, and PCI Express interface

• SiCortex was founded by John Mucci, Matt Reilly, and Jud Leonard
  • company built and sold more than 80 systems of up to 5,832 cores each
  • compute nodes were interconnected by a network based on the Kautz graph
  • Bob Supnik, then Kem Stewart, ran engineering
  • operated from 2004-2009 in the old red brick mill complex in Maynard, MA, that was DEC's headquarters
  • several members of the SOC design team came from DEC-Hudson's Alpha chip development group; the first generation chip taped out 21 months after hiring the team
  • acquired the PathScale compilers that were developed as the MIPSPro compilers for the MIPS R10000 by Tom McWilliams, Jeff Rubin, Jeff Broughton, and Fred Chow (all of whom had worked together on the LLNL S1); Cray bought the compiler suite when the SiCortex assets were sold
  • see 2009 interview with Matt Reilly

Tera

• Tera (multithreaded VLIW) - Burton Smith
  • descended from Deneclor HEP and SRC Horizon

Texas Instruments

• TI-ASC, 1972 -
  • H. Cragon and W.J. Watson, "The TI Advanced Scientific Computer," IEEE Computer, January 1989, pp. 55-64.

Thinking Machines, Inc. (TMI)

• Connection Machine, 1981 - Danny Hillis
  • CM-1 (1985) - hypercube with single-bit processors
  • CM-2 (1987), CM-2a, CM-200 - added FPUs
  • CM-5 (1993), CM-5E - fat tree with SPARC processors

VLIW processors

... more to do!

See multimedia processor section.

Apollo (see Apollo entry in workstation processor section)

Culler Scientific Systems

• Culler-7, 1986 - Glen Culler (lead), Bob Pearson, John Richardson, Mike McCammon, and Dave Probert (see Culler-7 web page)

Cydrome

• Cydrome Cydra 5, 1988 - Bob Rau, Ross Towle, David Yen, and Wei Yen
  • Ross Towle - compiler
  • worked for Gary Beck on the processor: Tom Anderson, Joe Bratt, John Brennan, Ray Bulger, Gulbin Ezer, Tim Fu, Craig Nelson, Frank Reid, Chris Rockwood, and Steve Wilson. Don DeSota later joined and managed part of the team.
  • worked on the memory system - Ed Wolff and Norman Yeung
  • worked for Jack Kister on the I/O system: Gil Lauer, Jack Mills, David Roe, and Mohammed Seth
  • others who contributed to hardware and software efforts: Jim Dehnert, Stimson Ho, and Mike McNamara
  • Peter Hsu and Mike Schlansker did the groundwork for the Cydra 10 (which did not get further than a paper design before the company folded)
  • Peter Hsu went to MIPS and the MIPS R8000 was greatly influenced by the Cydra designs
• Bob Rau, David Yen, Wei Yen, and Ross Towle, "The Cydra 5 Departmental Supercomputer: Design Philosophies, Decisions, and Trade-offs," IEEE Computer, January 1989, pp. 12-35.
• Gary R. Beck, David W. L. Yen, and Thomas L. Anderson, "The Cydra 5 Minisupercomputer: Architecture and Implementation," The Journal of Supercomputing, 1993. (also appears in B. R. Rau and J. A. Fisher (eds.), Instruction-Level Parallelism, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.)

FPS (Floating Point Systems)

• AP-120B, 1975 (array processor for signal processing) - Alan Charlesworth and George O'Leary
• FPS-164, 1980 (array processor for scientific computing)

Fujitsu

• Tacyon - Toshiaki Kitamura

Intel

• Intel i860 (N10), 1989 - Les Kohn
  • RISC-like processor with dual instruction mode (LIW)
  • See discussion of design team in Tekla Perry, "Intel's secret is out," IEEE Spectrum, April 1989, pp. 22-28. A picture of the design team is on the cover of this issue.
  • exposed pipelines were criticized for their effect on context switch complexity and latency, later the chip was used by many as a graphics accelerator
• i860XP (N11) - David Perlmutter (Chief), Michael Kagan (lead)
  • an extension to N10, with MP support (enable physical snooping), new process, and better performance.

Multiflow

• Multiflow TRACE, 1988 - Dave Papworth (co-chief), Paul Rodman (co-chief), and John O'Donnell
  • Based on ideas of Josh Fisher
  • compiler folks: John Ruttenberg, Geoff Lowney, Tom Karzes, Stefan Freudenberger, Cindy Collins, Woody Lichtenstein (worked on the Culler-7)
  • hardware team: Chandra Joshi (memory), Richard Lethin (floating point), John Feehrer, Mauro Lupero (I/O), Bob Colwell
  • operating systems team: Bob Nix, Doug Gilmore, Ben Cutler, Chris Ryland
  • for a description of Multiflow as a startup company, see Elizabeth Fisher, Multiflow Computer: A Start-up Odyssey, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Tera (see supercomputer processor section)

Texas Instruments

• "VelociTI" VLIW architecture - Ray Simar (lead)
  • TMS320C6xx - Ray Simar (lead)

Independence architecture processors

Name due to Josh Fisher and Bob Rau. Explicitly encoded information on instruction independence is placed in the instruction format by the compiler. Difference from VLIW is that hardware does the scheduling. Example prototype is Burton Smith's Horizon processor. ... more to do!

Intel

• Intel IA-64, 1997 - John Crawford, chief architect
  • first discussions about joint venture in December 1993
  • cooperation announced in June 1994
  • joint ACM committee (architecture, compilers, microarchitecture)
    • five Intel members:
      • John Crawford (chief architect for overall effort)
      • Hans Mulder (architecture)
      • Harsh Sharangpani (microarchitecture and x86 floating point compatibility)
      • Kent Fielden (compilers)
      • Jack Mills (architecture and performance evaluation)
    • five HP members:
      • Jerry Huck (lead architect for HP)
      • Rajiv Gupta (architecture, Wide-Word background)
      • David Fotland (microarchitecture, PA-RISC background)
      • Dale Morris (architecture, PA-RISC background)
      • Carol Thompson (compilers)
  • partially based on P7 effort at Intel guided by Don Alpert
  • partially based on PA-Wide-Word effort at HP Labs guided by Bill Worley, 1990-1993; also called SP-PA (Super-Parallel Processor Architecture) [see Joel Birnbaum's talk at Microprocessor Forum]
  • Crawford and Huck introduced the EPIC philosophy at the 1997 Microprocessor Forum
  • IEEE Micro special issue on IA-64
  • IEEE Computer, February 2000, article by Schlansker and Rau on EPIC

  • Itanium implementations
    • Merced, 2001 - first implementation, Intel team
      • Don Alpert, engineering manager 1993-1998; Avtar Saini and Gary Thomas were first two project managers; project converged under final project manager Gadi Singer
      • Harsh Sharangpani, lead microarchitect
      • Ken Arora, lead designer for control logic
      • Ken Shoemaker, lead designer for x86 compatibility
      • Sharangpani introduced the Itanium microarchitecture at the 1999 Microprocessor Forum; see also Linley Gwennap, "Merced shows innovative design," Microprocessor Report, October 6, 1999, pp. 1-6
      • Harsh Sharangpani, "Intel Itanium Processor Core" (pdf), Hot Chips 12 slides, August 2000.
      • Harsh Sharangpani and Ken Arora, "Itanium Processor Microarchitecture," IEEE Micro, Sept./Oct. 2000, pp. 24-43
    • McKinley, 2002 - second implementation, HP team
      • Don Soltis (and others?)
      • Madison was 2003 revision
    • Montecito, 2006
      • Cameron McNairy (and others?)
      • dual core; 2-way multithreading per core
      • Montvale was 2007 revision
    • Tukwila, 2010
      • Eric DeLano (chief architect)
      • quad core; 2-way simultaneous multithreading per core; Quick Path Interconnect

  ---

  Texas Instruments

  • "VelociTI" VLIW architecture - Ray Simar (lead) (see VLIW processor section)

  ---

  Mainframe processors

  to be done

  ---

  Burroughs

  • B5000, 1963 - Bob Barton
  • B5500, 1964 -
  • B6500, 1969 - Jake Vigil (microarchitecture) and Ben Dent (software)
  • B7500 -
  • B5700, 1970 -
  • B6700 -
  • B7700 -
  • A-series -

  • B1700 - Bob Barton and W.T. Wilner
    • B1712, B1726 - First generation hardware implementing a reloadable microarchitecture. Interpreters were kept in main memory and were swapped by the OS (MCP) as different language codes ran.
    • B1835, B1855, B1865 - upgrades with a cache memory for the interpreter
    • B1910, B1955, B1965 - TTL-based implementations of the architecture. The B1900 was designed by a group led by Ed (Bud) Keeley. Bill Sprouse and Frank Williams were the main hardware designers with Steven Tsai, Steven Amic, and Steve Wilson also working on the CPU. The I/O subsystem group was led by Jerry Wygant. Todd Barth did the disk controller.

  ---

  Control Data Corporation (CDC)

  • 1604, 1960 - Seymour Cray (see Gordon Bell's talk on Cray)
  • 3600, 1963 - Charles Cassel, Max Goldberg, Charles Hawley, and Ken Thiede, architecture; Don Pagelkopf, chief engineer; Ron Hintz and Stan Aschenbrauner, CPU design; Charles Hawley, memory and I/O channels; Sam Slais, tape controller; Sid Anderson, card reader/punch

  ---

  Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

  • PDP-10 - see DEC entry in minicomputer section

  ---

  General Electric (GE) / Honeywell Information Systems (HIS)

  • Several GE papers in Winter 1995 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
  • Honeywell acquired GE computer business in 1970

  • ERMA (check-processing system for Bank of America, based on MICR) prototype at SRI, 1955 - Tom Morrin (SRI); production model was GE-100, 1959 - Barney Oldfield; later upgraded to GE-210
  • GE-302/312 (industrial control), 1957 - Arnold Spielberg
  • GE-225 (derived from 312), 1962 - Arnold Spielberg; later 215 and 235 (DTSS, 1964) models added; model 265 was a 235 with DATANET 30 terminal controller

  • GE-635, 1963 - John Couleur
    • genesis was in military work on MISTRAM computer, ca. 1959
    • John Couleur, "The core of the Black Canyon Computer Corporation," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 17, 4, 1995, pp. 56-60.
    • ran GECOS; other models included 615 and 625
    • renamed Honeywell 6000 series (GECOS renamed GCOS); some models extended with decimal/COBOL-oriented inst. set called EIS
    • follow-ons were Series 60/Level 66, then DPS-66

  • GE-645 (MULTICS - Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), 1965 - John Couleur (GE) and Edward Glaser (MIT)
    • Frank Fahrlander wrote a system simulation; Jim Haynes headed up the 645 hardware prototype; G.A. Oliver worked on the design of the segmentation scheme; and, Ed Thelen helped design the GIOC
    • John Couleur invented the TLB and indicates that this was an important factor in MIT and Bell Labs choosing GE over IBM for Project MAC
    • added advanced segmented and paged memory system along with protection rings to 635 processor; initial plans for 32 protection rings reduced to 8 rings in final hardware; 645 ran fairly slow (wags said MULTICS = "Multiple Useless Large Tables in Core Simultaneously"); users beyond Project MAC allowed on single operational system at MIT in 1969
    • follow-ons were Honeywell 6180 in 1972, then Series 60/Level 68, then DPS-68, then DPS-8/M
    • Multics Repository at Stratus Computer
    • Tom Van Vleck's MULTICS pages

  ---

  Fujitsu

  • FACOM100, 1954 - Toshio Ikeda (relay computer)
  • FACOM128A, 1956 - Toshio Ikeda (scientific relay computer)
  • FACOM128B, 1958 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM138A, 1957 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM200, 1958 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM201, 1960 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM202, 1960 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM212, 1959 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM222P, 1961 - Toshio Ikeda (transistorized)
  • FACOM230-50, 1964 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM230-60, 1968 - Toshio Ikeda
  • FACOM230-75, 1973 - Toshio Ikeda
  • M-190, 1975 - Toshio Ikeda
  • M-200, 1978 - Yoshioka Yosiro
  • M-380, 1982 - Takamitsu Tuchimoto
  • M-780, 1986 - Kazuyuki Shimizu, Hirosada Tone
  • M-1800, 1991 - Yuji Oinaga
  • GS8600, 1996 - Hirosada Tone, Aiichiro Inoue
  • GS8800, 1998 - Hirosada Tone, Aiichiro Inoue
  • Chaos (the preliminary conceptual work for GS8800B) - Robert Tomasulo, Bob Maier, Mark Nielson
  • GS8800B, 1999 - Aiichiro Inoue, Takeo Asakawa, Tsuyoshi Motokurumada, Kuniki Morita
  • GS8900, 2000 - Aiichiro Inoue
  • GS21-600 - Aiichiro Inoue
  • GS21-900 - Aiichiro Inoue

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  International Business Machines (IBM)

  • 650, 1953 - Ernest Hughes (chief architect) and Frank Hamilton (chief designer)

  • 701, 1953 - Nat Rochester (chief architect) and Jerrier Haddad (engineering manager)
    • see the April 1983 special issue of the Annals of the History of Computing
    • IBM page on 701 team
  • 702/705, 1953/1954 - Werner Buchholz
  • 704, 1954 - Gene Amdahl

  • NORC, 1954 (Naval Ordnance Research Calculator) - Byron Havens (chief engineer)
    • IBM page on NORC team

  • 7030 (Stretch), 1955-1961 - Stephen Dunwell (project manager), Eric Bloch (engineering manager); Gerrit Blaauw, Fred Brooks, Werner Buchholz, John Cocke, and Harwood Kolsky (others ...)
    (Gene Amdahl contributed to the design before he resigned in 1955)
  • 7070 was a transistorized descendent of the 650
  • 7080 -
  • 709/7090 - (Gene Amdahl contributed to the 709 design before he resigned in 1955)
  • 7040/7044 -
  • 7094 -
  • 7950 (Harvest), 1958-1962 - James Pomerene

  • 1401, 1959 - many people involved with major contributions from Francis Underwood
  • 1620 -

  • System/360, 1964 ("360 degrees of data processing") - - lead architects were Fred Brooks (project manager), Gene Amdahl (architecture manager), and Gerrit Blaauw (second architect and manual author); also involved with the design were Richard Case, George Grover, William Harms, Derek Henderson, Paul Herwitz, Graham Jones, Andris Padegs, Anthony Peacock, David Reid, Willian Stevens, and William Wright
    • model 20, 1966 - G.F. Nielsen (engr. mgr.)
    • model 30, 1965 - Jack Greene (engr. mgr.) [Endicott]
    • model 40, 1965 - John Fairclough (engr. mgr.) [Hursley; Grant Bush key liaison]
    • model 50, 1965 - John Hipp (engr. mgr.), Gerry Paul (CPU mgr.) [Poughkeepsie; Pete Fagg (systems mgr.)]
    • model 65, 1965 - Joe Brown and Dick Case (engr. mgrs.), Frank Wise (I/O channel mgr.) [Poughkeepsie; Pete Fagg (systems mgr.)]
    • model 75, 1966 - Carl Christiansen, then Daniel Doody (engr. mgrs.), Richard Holleran (CPU mgr.), Leo Hasbrouk (instruction processing unit), Wes Stetler (arithmetic unit), William Wissick (bus control unit), Earl Miller (maintenance unit, power, and packaging), Frank Wise (I/O channel mgr.), Joe Tondreau (?) (program coordination and admin. mgr.) [Poughkeepsie design / Kingston built; Phil Stoughton, then Pete Fagg (systems mgr.)]
    • model 67, 1966 - Joe Brown (engr. mgr.), Gene Amdahl (address relocation)
    • model 91, 1967 - Mike Flynn, Robert Tomasulo (FP unit)
      • highly parallel FP unit; first [?] use of fetching down taken and untaken branch paths
    • model 85, 1969 - W.R. Demmer (engr. mgr.), Stan Pitkowsky (CPU mgr.); Don Gibson, Carl Conti, and Jim Shelly worked on cache; John Liptay designed the instruction unit; (others from the model 65 engineering team)

  • S/370 - Richard Case (systems architecture mrg.); Andres Padegs, Ron Smith, many programmers and engineers
    • model 135, 1972 - (developed from S/360 model 25?)
    • model 145, 1971 -
    • model 155, 1971 - M. Monachino (CPU mgr.)
    • model 165, 1971 - (developed from S/360 model 85)
    • 3031, 1978 - (developed from S/370 model 158)
    • 3032/3033, 1978 - (developed from S/370 model 168)
      • 3033 - John Liptay was the chief engineer and worked with Jim Rymarczyk on the I-unit. Pat Gannon and Ken Sze worked on the Storage Control Unit, Ken Parchinski worked on the E-unit, Danny Casper and Bob Capowski worked on the I/O channels, and Herb Driver did the microcode.
    • 4300, 1979 - (developed from S/370 model 148)
    • 3081, 1981 - Sam Levine, Joe Wetzel

  • 370/XA architecture, 1983 - Andres Padegs, Ron Smith, Julian Thomas, many programmers and engineers (programming mgt. included: Mike Mall and Rick Baum)
    • (available on 3081)
    • 3090, 1985 - Julian Thomas, Werner Bucholz, and Ron Smith (architects), Les Garcia (engineering), Stuart Tucker (I-element and vector unit), Ron Linton (microprogramming), Henry Brandt (BCU), Joe Datres (memory)

  • ESA/390 architecture, 1990
    • ES/9000
      • high-end models (9022 CPU) - John Liptay
    • CMOS generations
      • G1, 1994 -
      • G2, 1995 -
      • G3, 1996 -
      • G4, 1997 - Webb and Liptay
      • G5, 1998 - (added BTB)
      • G6, 1999 -

  • z/Architecture, 64 bit extensions, 2000
    • z900, 2000 -
    • z990, 2003 -
    • z9, 2005 -
    • z10, 2008 -

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  Univac

  • ERA 1101/1102, 1950 - Arnold Cohen in charge of the logical design, Jack Hill and Frank Mullaney led the engineering development team.
    • see George Gray, "Engineering Research Associates and the Atlas Computer (UNIVAC 1101)," Unisys History Newsletter, Volume 3, Number 3, June, 1999.
    • three 1102s were built and all delivered to Arnold AFB in Tennessee
  • 1103/1103A, 1953/1956 - Arnold Cohen (with involvement by Seymour Cray)
    (Note that Seymour Cray states that he did the 1103 by himself in a 1995 interview with D. Allison; see p. 8.)
  • 1105, 1958 -
  • 1107, 1962 -
    The 1107 was derived from the computer designed for the Navy Tactical Data System (NTDS), which had various internal names such as M-460 and CP-642. The commercial version was the UNIVAC 490. These machines had a 30-bit word. The original design was by Seymour Cray. It was re-implemented in 1960 by a team led by Arnold Henderson. This basic design was extended to a 36 bit word along with other modifications to be the 1107. See George Gray and Ron Smith, "Sperry Rand's Transistor Computers," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 20, No. 3, July-Sept. 1998.

  • 1108, 1966 -
  • 1110, 1970 -
  • bought by Sperry

    (see also Unisys History Newsletter by George Gray)

  ---

  Minisupercomputer processors

  ... more to do!

  ---

  Alliant

  • FX/8, 1985
    • The ISA was basically an emulated Motorola 68012, augmented with vector instructions and parallel processing constructs. The special parallel processing features (hardware, self-scheduled, DO ALL and DO ACROSS functions) were inspired by work done at University of Illinois and further developed by Alliant's founders, especially Ron Gruner and Craig Mundie.
    • The primary architect for the vector ISA augmentations was Mat Myszewski, with contributions from Josh Rosen and Stan Lackey, who were the chief hardware implementers for the CPUs (CEs in Alliant-speak).
    • Mike Ziegler was the primary architect for the overall system configuration and the cache and memory system in particular.
    • The parallel processing hardware (Concurrency Control Unit) and the instruction set extensions that made use of it were architected by Mat Myszewski and Mike Ziegler. Jim Veres was the primary implementer of this hardware and also contributed to the design.
    • Jim Veres was also responsible for the overall IO system architecture.
    • Stan Lackey, Jim Veres, and Mike Ziegler, "Supercomputer Expands Parallel Processing Options," Computer Design, August 15, 1985, p. 76.
    • For a description of the startup environment of Alliant, see the interview of Ron Gruner in Chater 32 of Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days, Apress, 2007.

  ---

  Ardent

  • Titan, 1988 - Bell, Miranker, Rubinstein, and Sanguinetti?
    • G. Miranker, J. Rubinstein, and J. Sanguinetti, "Squeezing a Cray-class supercomputer into a single-user package," COMPCON, San Francisco, Feb. 1988, pp. 452-456.
    • G. Bell, G. Miranker, and J. Rubinstein, "Supercomputing for one," IEEE Spectrum, 25, 4, April 1988, pp. 46-50.
    • R. Allen, "Unifying vectorization, parallelization, and optimization: The Ardent compiler," Proc. 3rd ICS, Boston, May 1988, pp. 176-184.
    • J. Sanguinetti, "Micro-analysis of the Titan's operation pipe," Proc. ICS, St. Malo, July 1988, pp. 190-196.
    • T. Diede, C. Hagenmaier, G. Miranker, and J. Rubinstein, "The Titan graphics supercomputer architecture," IEEE Computer, 21, 9, Sept. 1988, pp. 13-31.
    • G. Miranker, J. Rubinstein, and J. Sanguinetti, "Getting it right the first time: The Ardent design methodology," COMPCON, San Francisco, Feb. 1989, pp. 529-533.
    • B. Borden, "Graphics processing on a graphics supercomputer," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, July 1989, pp. 56-62.
    • R. Allen, "Exploiting multiple granularities of parallelism in a computer," COMPCON, San Francisco, Feb. 1990, pp. 634-640.
    • Dan Siewiorek and Phil Koopman, The Architecture of Supercomputers: Titan, a case study, Academic Press, 1991.

    • Tom Anderson, Gary Beck, Joe Bratt, and Chris Rockwood came to Ardent after Cydrome closed to work on the second-generation Titan and the desktop Stiletto version
    • merged with Stellar to form Stardent

  ---

  Convex

  • C1 - Steve Wallach, Tom Jones
  • C2 -
    • T. Jones, "Engineering Design of the Convex C2," IEEE Computer, January 1989, pp. 36-44. [half page on staffing issues]

  ---

  Scientific Computer Systems

  • SCS-40 -

  ---

  Stardent

  • merger of Stellar and Ardent
  • became Kubota Pacific ...

  ---

  Supertek

  • S-1 - (there was a COMPCON paper) - Mike Fang
  • acquired by Cray and the S-1 was relabelled as Cray XMS; the Supertek S-2 design became the Cray YMP-EL

  ---

  Stellar

  • GS-1000, 1988
    • OS and compiler team
      • Clem Cole was original OS leader
      • others included Lee Cooprider, Max Smith, Tom Teixeira, Les Crudele, Pete Darnell
    • Logic designers and chip implementers
      • Bill Poduska, Michael Sporer, Todd Basche, Peter Oppen, and Brian Apgar
    • 4-way multithreading with dual-issue from each stream
    • M. Sporer, F. Moss, and C. Mathias, "An introduction to the architecture of the Stellar graphics supercomputer," COMPCON 1988, pp. 464-467.
    • merged with Ardent to form Stardent

  ---

  ---

  Minicomputer and Superminicomputer processors

  ... more to do!

  ---

  Cal Data

  • Cal Data 135, 197x - Ken Omohundro
    • microprogrammable, came with PDP-11/40 emulator
    • ... material to add ...

  ---

  Data General

  • DG Nova, 1969 - Henry Burkhardt III
    • The Nova was the first 16-bit small computer to use a multi-register architecture, with 4 registers, 2 of which could be used as index registers. It had a symmetric instruction set, a clean IO structure and occupied 5 1/4" in a 19" rack configuration. In 1969, its list price was about $7,000 with an 8Kb memory.
  • DG Nova 2 - Dave Bernstein and Mike Druke
  • DG Nova 3 - Dave Bernstein
  • DG Nova 4 - Dave Grondalski
  • DG Supernova - Larry Seligman and Ron Gruner (first minicomputer to use solid state memory)
  • DG microNova - Gardner Hendrie
  • DG microNova 200 - Dave Bernstein (a bit-slice implementation of the Nova instruction set crammed into the microNova PCB form factor)
  • DG Nova 1200 - Ron Gruner
  • DG Nova 800 - Larry Seligman
  • DG Eclipse
    • Ron Gruner - architect, logic design
    • Carl Alsing - instruction set design and firmware implementation
  • DG microEclipse - Dave Bernstein (an implementation using a two-level control store to work around the package pinout limitations of the day)
  • DG FHP (Fountainhead Project) - Ron Gruner, Rich Belgard, Dick Bratt, Gerry Clancy, Tom Jones, Larry Katz, and others (was not marketed; this was the North Carolina-based project described in Tracy Kidder's book; see US Patent 4,455,602 "Digital Data Processing System")
  • Data General MV 8000
    • Tom West - project director and visionary
    • Steve Wallach - architect, hardware system layout
    • Carl Alsing - instruction set design, hiring
    • "Microkids"
      • Carl Alsing - manager of microprogramming and simulation
      • microcode - Chuck Holland (supervisor), Bob Beauchamp, Jon Blau, Dave Keating, Paul Reilly, Betty Shanahan, and Steve Staudahler
      • simulation - Dave Peck (supervisor) and Neal Firth
    • "Hardy Boys"
      • Ed Rasala - manager of hardware design
      • Ken Holberger (supervisor), Dick Coyle, Dave Epstein, Jim Guyer, Mike Hobbs, Josh Rosen, Jim Veres, Len Winmill, David Zeek, Mike Ziegler
    • The project is described in Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine. Tom West, although aloof with the Hardyboys and Microkids, leaving them for his 'Lieutenants' to manage, worked closely with Wallach, who designed the system architecture, Rasala, who designed the logic, and Alsing, who designed the instruction set and recruited the 'kids'. Tom was the architect in the sense of mastermind: visionary, leader, and project manager, who sees the big picture while tracking even the obscure tasks.
    • Kidder-book-related resources
      • Donald Christiansen, "All in a Day's Work," Today's Engineer, Feb. 2005. [brief summary of book]
      • John Faughnan and Sanja Stevanovic, "Flight of the Eagle: The Birthing and Life of a Super-Minicomputer" (pdf file), project management review, March 1996. [includes MV 8000 project timeline in attachments]
      • Evan Ratliff, "O, Engineers!" Wired, Dec. 2000. [retrospective]
      • where are they now?, Wired, Dec. 2000.
    • MV 8000 technical resources
      • Jonathan Blau, Charles Holland, and David Keating, "The micro-architecture of the ECLIPSE MV/8000: Conception and implementation" (ACM DL link), MICRO-13, 1980.
      • David Epstein, "The ECLIPSE MV/8000 microsequencer" (ACM DL link), MICRO-13, 1980.
      • Neal Firth, "The role of software tools in the development of the ECLIPSE MV/8000 microcode" (ACM DL link), MICRO-13, 1980.
      • Paul Reilly, Elizabeth Shanahan, and Steven Staudaher, "An implementation of microdiagnostics on the ECLIPSE MV/8000" (ACM DL link), MICRO-13, 1980.
  • Data General MV 10000 -

  ---

  Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

  • C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara, Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design, Digital Press, 1978, for a wonderful history of DEC systems

  • 18-bit computer family
    • PDP-1, 1960 - Ben Gurley (head), Harlan Anderson, Dick Best, Ken Olsen, Stan Olsen, and Bob Savell; influenced by MIT TX-0
    • PDP-4, 1962 - Gordon Bell; influenced by MIT LINC
    • PDP-7, 1964
    • PDP-9, 1968
    • PDP-15, 1970

  • PDP-2 name reserved for a 24-bit computer which was never built

  • 36-bit computer family
    • PDP-3, 1960 - paper design, one built by a customer (Scientific Engineering Institute)
    • PDP-6, 1964 - Gordon Bell (architect)
      PDP-6 development team:
      • Harlan Anderson, VP of Engineering
      • Gordon Bell, System Architect
        • Alan Kotok, Asst. Architect and Logic Designer
        • Russ Doane, Circuits
        • Ken Senior(?), Field Service
        • Bob Reed, Technician
        • Leo Gossel, Diagnostics
      • Dit Morse, Software Project Leader
        • Tom Hastings and Dave Gross, Monitor
        • Harris Hyman and Steve Pinar, MACRO
        • Tom Eggers, DDT
        • Bell Segal, Utilities
        • Peter Sampson and Al Blackington, FORTRAN
        • Ed Yourdon, LOADER
      • picture of "PDP-6 Design Team"
    • PDP-10 (KA10), 1967 - Alan Kotok (architect)
      KA teams, 1967
      • Hardware: Alan Kotok, Bob Clements, Dave Gross, and Bill English (documentation)
      • Software: Tom Hastings, Tony Wachs, Dave Plummer, Don Whitcraft, Alan Frantz, Pat White, Valdeane Alusic, Penny Land, Mauri Fredrickson, Joe Fries, Nick Pappas, Tom Eliot (documentation), and Chris White (joined in 1969)
    • KI10 (1060), 1972
    • KL10 (1080), 1976
      • Alan Kotok (architect and largely responsible for cache and memory design), Bob Reid (execution unit), Jud Leonard (designed the "business instruction set" and wrote the microcode), Bill Bruckert
      • also used in DECSYSTEM-20 (2040/2050)
      • derivatives named with A,B,C,D,E suffixes
    • KS10, 1978
      • also used in DECSYSTEM-20 (2020)
    • KC10 (Jupiter) cancelled
    • some other web sites
      • Joe Smith's PDP-10 site

  • 12-bit computer family
    • PDP-5, 1963 - Gordon Bell and Alan Kotok; Edson DeCastro did the logic design; influenced by the MIT LINC
    • PDP-8, 1965
    • PDP-12 - switched between PDP-8 and LINC instruction sets
    • PDP-14

  • 16-bit PDP-X (cancelled) - Edson DeCastro and Henry Burkhardt; register-memory model like PDP-10
    (see Bob Supnik, "What was the PDP-X?", 2004, pdf)

  • 16-bit computer family, PDP-11 - Gordon Bell
    • PDP-11/20, 1970
    • PDP-11/05, 1972
    • PDP-11/45, 1972
    • PDP-11/70, 1975
    • LSI-11, 1975
    • F-11, 1979
    • J-11, 1983
    • G. Bell and W. Strecker, "What have we learned from the PDP-11? (1975)
    • G. Bell, Retrospective on the PDP-11 (1995, unpublished)
    • G. Bell and W. Strecker, Retrospective on the PDP-11 (1995)

  • 32-bit computer family, VAX - William Strecker
    • VAXA group met in 1975, composed of Gordon Bell, Peter Conklin, Dave Cutler, Bill Demmer, Tom Hastings, Richie Lary, Dave Rodgers, Steve Rothman, and Bill Strecker as chief architect
    • "Blue Ribbon" committee to simplify design in 1976: three hardware engineers, Bill Strecker, Richie Lary, and Steve Rothman; and three software engineers, Dave Cutler, Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lipman
    • TTL-based implementations
      • VAX-11/780, 1978 (5 MHz, TTL)
        • Dave Rodgers (engineering manager)
        • Bob Stewart (cache), Al Helenius (instruction decoder), Steve Jenkins (execution unit)
        • Jud Leonard (microcode group leader), group included Tryggve Fossum, Marty Hurley, and others
      • VAX-11/750, 1980 (gate array TTL) - David Cane
      • VAX-11/730, 1982 (bit-slice)
        • Ken Okin (project lead manager)
        • Stan Lackey (processor hardware designer, responsible for the implementation architecture and logic design)
        • microcode: Simon Steely (supervisor), Jim Van Sciver (floating-point), Tim Leonard (interrupts and exceptions, memory management, privileged instructions, and compatibility mode), Kim Meinerth, and Dave Miller.
        • hardware engineers: Dave Stoner, Dave Hiles, Dave Ives, and Dave Thomson
        • VMS support for the 730: Trudy Matthews and Nancy Kronenberg
    • Nancy Kronenberg was Mary Payne's daughter, and they may have been Digital's first two female consultant engineers. Mary was a mathematician, was the source of the VAX POLY instructions, drove the "good to the last bit" policy for VAX floating-point accuracy, and was Digital's representative to the IEEE FP standards committee.
    • Roger Gourd was the engineering manager for VAX Software; Dave Cutler and Dick Hustvedt were VMS co-designers
    • first dual VAX was put together by Goble at Purdue, 1980
    • ECL-based implementations
      • 8600, 1984 (12.5 MHz) -
        • Jud Leonard (system architect until 1981)
        • Tryggve Fossum led the floating point work, Al Helenius did the instruction decoder, and Bob Elkind designed the execution unit
        • first VAX design with overlapped operand decoding and fetching; see DTJ August 1985
      • 8800/8700/8500, 1986
        • pipelined the microinstructions
        • I-box and E-box - Jim Keller, project leader
        • FPU - John Zurawski and Anil Jain
        • see DTJ February 1987
      • 9000, 1989 (code named Aquarius, 62.5 MHz) - "mainframe" VAX with vector processing
        • design started in 1983; RISC-like load/store architecture within the E-box; the I-box acted as a preprocessor and translated VAX instructions into simpler internal instructions for the E-box as well as decoded and fetched operands
        • original team members - David Fite, Tryggve Fossum, Bill Grundmann, Rick Hetherington, Dwight Manley, John Murray, Bill Smith, and David Webb
        • I-box - John Murray, project leader; David Fite, branch prediction, inst. fetch, inst. decode; Mark Firstenberg and Mike McKeon
        • E-box - Ron Salett, project leader; Bill Grundmann, Larry Herman, Ginny Lamere, Elaine Fite, Dan Sterling, Eileen Samberg, Mark Haq, and Matt Adiletta
        • M-box - Dave Webb, Maurice Steinman, Joe Macri, Brad Hollister, and Basheer Ahmed
        • V-box - Dileep Bhandarkar, chief architect for vector processing; Francis McKeen, project leader; Richard Brunner, Bimal Patil, William Rodgers, and Greg Yoder
        • service processor - Michael Evans, project leader; Karen Benard, Stephen Conway, David D'Antonio, Susan DesMarais, Matthew Goldman, Paul Leveille, and Brian Rost
        • TLB and cache design - Rick Hetherington, project leader
        • performance modeling - Dwight Manley
        • see DTJ Fall 1990
      • other mid-range ECL projects, ultimately cancelled due to the progress in CMOS clock rate, were BVAX, Argonaut, and Raven
    • NMOS-based implementations
      • microVAX, 1985 (VAX subset)
        • microVAX I was a quick implementation (NMOS datapath and TTL control unit) by Dave Cutler's group in Seattle to test a subset approach to implementing the VAX instruction set
        • microVAX II was a 5 MHz single-chip CPU implementation with major parts of the CPU design and microcode taken from the V-11 project
        • Bob Supnik (CPU project manager and microcode), Dan Dobberpuhl (CPU lead engineer), Rich Witek (CPU microarchuitecture), Larry Walker (FPU project manager), and Bob Simcoe (FPU lead engineer)
        • see DTJ March 1986 and Bob Supnik's microVAX description
      • V-11, 1986 (code named Scorpio, up to 6.25 MHz)
        • chipset implementing the full VAX instruction set, used in 8200
        • project started earlier than the microVAX II but shipped after the microVAX II
        • Bill Johnson (project manager), Dick Sites (chief architect and project lead for microcode team), Ed Burdick (IE chip project lead), Bill Grundmann (project lead M chip)
        • see Bob Supnik's v11 description
    • CMOS-based implementations
      • CVAX, 1987 (up to 14 MHz)
        • chipset used in VAX 6200/6300
        • Dan Casaletto (project manager), Bob Supnik (chief architect and most of microcode) Paul Rubinfeld (CPU chip project lead), Gil Wolrich (FPU chip project lead)
        • see DTJ August 1988 and Bob Supnik's CVAX description
      • Rigel, 1989 (up to 40 MHz)
        • chipset used in VAX 6400/4300
        • Amnon Fischer (project manager), Mike Uhler (chief architect and most of microcode), Bill Herrick (CPU chip project lead), Moshe Gavrielov (FPU chip project lead), Rebecca Stamm (cache controller chip project lead)
        • see DTJ Spring 1990 and Bob Supnik's Rigel description
      • NVAX, 1991 (up to 90 MHz) and NVAX+, 1991 (up to 143 MHz)
        • single chip, based on microarchitecture of VAX 9000
        • NVAX used in VAX 6600 and various 4x00 models; NVAX+ used in VAX 7600/10600
        • Bill Herrick (project manager), Michael Uhler (chief architect), Debra Bernstein, Larry Biro, John Brown, John Edmondson, Jeffrey Pickholtz, and Rebecca Stamm
        • see DTJ Summer 1992 and Bob Supnik's NVAX description
    • VAX development ended in 1996
    • See the booklet VAX OpenVMS at 20, 1977-1997 (includes a picture of the 8600 design team)

  • PRISM, Alpha - see DEC entry in workstation section

  • Mica (high performance video chip) - John Kowaleski

  ---

  National Semi

  • PACE, 1975

  ---

  Prime

  • Bill Poduska, founder; architecture derived from Honeywell 16-bit computers with influence also from Multics (e.g., protection rings); first architects were Walter Jones, who went on to IPL to design a 3090 ECL based machine, Paul Jones, who went to Stellar, and Mike Sporer. Bill Poduska went on to start up Apollo.
  • Prime 950 series - Paul Rodman and Dave Papworth

  ---

  Tandem

  • Tandem T16 - Michael Green, Joel Bartlett, Jim Katzman, etc.

  ---

  Microcomputer processors

  ... much more to do!

  ---

  Intel

  • 8008, 1973
  • 8080, 1974
  • 8085

  • S.P. Morse, B.W. Ravenel, S. Mazor, and W.B. Pohlman, "Intel Microprocessors -- 8008 to 8086," IEEE Computer, October 1980, pp. 42-60. From the acknowledgements section:

    Pany people played significant roles in the development of these processors. Hence, it is not possible to single out a few for all the credit. However, if forced to choose those people who played the most significant roles on each chip, we can name the following: M.E. (Ted) Hoff was the architect and Federico Faggin the chip designer of the 4004. Stanley Mazor contributed to the 4004 architecture as well as to the architectures of the 8008 and 8080. Hoff and Hal Feeney were the major contributors to the 8008 development. Faggin managed the development of the 8080 and participated in defining its architecture, with Masatoshi Shima doing the logic and circuit design. Roger Swanson defined the new instructions for the 8085 while Peter Stoll and Andrew Volk performed the 8085 logic and circuit design. The 8086 architecture was defined by Stephen Morse and refined by Bruce Ravenel, with James McKevitt and John Bayliss responsible for the logic and circuit design. William Polhman managed both the 8085 and 8086 activities.

  ---

  Motorola

  • 6800, 1974 - Mike Wiles did the original architecture (original management goal was a single-chip PDP-11 microcomputer)
  • 6809, 1979 - Terry Ritter and Joel Boney (see the articles on the 6809 in BYTE, January and February, 1979, with pictures of the design team)

  ---

  MOS Technologies

  • 6502 - Chuck Peddle

  ---

  Zilog

  • Z80 - Masatoshi Shima

  ---

  Workstation processors

  Includes 32-bit and 64-bit processors. Some of these were called supermicrocomputers in the 1980s.

  ---

  Apple/IBM/Motorola PowerPC

  • PowerPC - Rich Oehler (IBM, with Cathy May and Ed Silha), Keith Diefendorff (with Motorola at the time), Ron Hochsprung (Apple), and John Sell (with Apple at the time)
    • started in 1991
    • Marty Hopkins also played a large part in PPC
    • Richard Oehler and Michael Blasgen, Evolution of PowerPC architecture video, October 1992
    • Altivec, 1998 - Keith Diefendorff
      • Keith did some work on vector extensions while at Motorola (he worked there from 1988 until 1995)
      • from 1996 to 1998, he was a distinguished scientist and the director of processor architecture and strategy at Apple

  • 32-bit implementations
    • 601, 1993 - Charles Moore and John Muhich
      • Keith Diefendorff, PPC 601 video (Hot Chips V), August 1993
    • 602, 1995
    • 603 family
      • 603, 1993 - Brad Burgess, Russ Reininger, and Jim Kahle
      • 603e, 1995 - Brad Burgess and Robert Golla
    • 604 family
      • 604, 1994 - Peter Song
      • Marvin Denman, PPC 604 video (Hot Chips VI), August 1994
      • 604e, 1996 - Marvin Denman (chief) and Mike Snyder (memory system/bus architect)

    • 740/750 (G3), 1997 - Brad Burgess
      • microarchitecture similar to 603
    • 7400/7410 (G4), 1999 - Mike Snyder
      • basically a 750 with Altivec
    • 7450, 2001 - Brad Burgess (chief) and Tom Peterson (memory system)
      • new pipeline

  • 64-bit implementations
    • 620, 1995 - Chin-Cheng Kau, Dave Levitan, Paul Rossbach, Roger Bailey, Don Waldecker, and Dave Bearden
      • shipped late, first MP-enabled PowerPC chip
    • Power3 (630), 1998 - Larry Thatcher, Paul Harvey, Mike Mayfield, and H. Lee; Mark Papermaster was the manager.
      • started with PowerPC 620 design
    • Power4, 2002 - Jim Kahle and Chuck Moore
      • two cores per chip
      • see "IBM icon of progress: Power 4"
        • Carl Anderson, Harold Chase, and James Warnock - circuit design, tools, methodology, manufacturing, and I/O subsystem
        • Roch Archambault, Robert Blainey, and James McInnes - compiler technologies
        • Ravi Arimilli and Leo Clark - multi-core, integrated and distributed cache, and memory
        • Geoffrey Blandy, Hye-Young McCreary, and Bruce Mealey - AIX
        • Bing-Lun Chu, Steve Fields, and Kevin Reick - design, verification, instrumentation, and test technologies
        • Jim Kahle and Hung Le - superscalar, superspeculative, out-of-order, high frequency core
        • Jan Klockow, Bradley McCredie, Michael Nealon, and Edward Seminaro - system design, power, packaging, and cooling technologies
        • Chet Mehta and David Willoughby - firmware
    • PowerPC 970 (G5), 2003 - Peter Sandon (chief)
      • derivative of Power4 but with single core and Altivec added
    • Power5 - Ravi Arimilli (?)
      • adds multithreading
    • Power6 - Balaram Sinharoy (?), Brad McCredie

  • extensions for AS/400 - Andy Wottreng and Mike Corrigan (under Frank Soltis)
    • called PowerPC AS, now called iSeries
    • some chips designated as RS64 are used in RS/6000 models
    • PPC AS A30 (Muskie), 1995
    • PPC AS A10 (Cobra), 1995 - at Endicott
    • PPC AS A35 (Apache, RS64-I)
    • Star family, 2-way multithreaded
      • Northstar (PPC AS A50, RS64-II), 1998
      • Pulsar (RS64-III), 1999
      • IStar, 2000
      • SStar (RS64-IV), 2001
    • Power4 includes AS extensions

  ---

  AMD 29K (Advanced Micro Devices)

  • AMD 29000 - Brian Case and Ole Moller (initial contributors); also Gigy Baror, Philip Frieden, Smeeta Gupta, Mike Johnson, Cheng-Gang Kong, Tim Olson, and David Sorensen; managerial support from Paul Chu and Bill Harmon
    • 29000, 1987 - David Witt
      • 3 bus, integer only, no d-cache, i-cache was a branch target cache (the BTC held the first four instructions at branch targets to cover the latency of fetching instructions from memory, idea for this came from Phil Frieden)
      • 29005 - cost-reduced 3-bus 29000, missing the BTC and MMU
    • 29027 (FPU), 1987 - Tim Flaherty and Bob Perlman
    • 29050, 1990 - Bob Perlman (lead), Mike Johnson, and Tim Olson
      • included 29000 and 29027, but was more than just an integration
    • unreleased superscalar 29K processor - Mike Johnson
      • was described at 1994 Microprocessor Forum and then used as the core of the AMD K5
    • 29030/29035/29040 (see embedded processor section)

  ---

  Apollo

  • Bill Poduska and Dave Nelson architected the packet-plexor domain network which became Apollo.
  • DN3000
  • PRISM (3-wide LIW), 1988 - Barry Flahive, Rick Bahr, and John Yates
    • John Yates contributed the multi-issue idea. An "FP companion" bit is the leftmost bit of the integer instruction format and is used to indicate if a paired floating-point instruction follows (which will be issued in parallel). The integer/FP pair must start on an 8-byte boundary, and an FP instruction cannot appear without the paired integer instruction. The five-operand version of the FP instruction format can specify both a multiply and an independent add/sub/truncate. Thus, with the integer operation, the Apollo can execute a peak of three operations/cycle -- FP multiply, FP add, and an integer operation (typically a load, for instance, of two floating point registers). The design was perfectly balanced for single-precision Linpack or FFT.
    • DN10000 - the first (and last) model, 54 MIPS, 36 megaflops in 1989.
      • Paul Mageau and Andy Milia were chiefly responsible for the memory system. Doug Voorhies, Olin Lathrop, and Dave Kirk were chiefly responsible for the graphics system.

  ---

  DEC (later Compaq)

  • Titan, 1986 - Neil Wilhelm and Jud Leonard
    • MultiTitan, 1988 - (DEC WRL) Norm Jouppi, +
  • PRISM (Parallel Reduced Instruction Set Machine), 1989 - Dave Cutler, Dileep Bhandarkar, Rich Witek, Dave Orbits, and Wayne Cardoza
    • multiple RISC efforts within DEC
      • Titan, started in 1982 under Forest Baskett
      • SAFE (Streamlined Architecture for Fast Execution), started in 1983 - Alan Kotok and Dave Orbits
      • HR-32, started in 1984 - Rich Witek and Dan Dobberpuhl
      • CASCADE project started under Dave Cutler in Seattle in 1984
      • Cutler tasked in 1985 to define corporate RISC plan
      • see Dileep Bhandarkar, section 1.4, Alpha Implementations and Architecture, Digital Press, 1996
    • first draft of PRISM architecture in August 1985
    • PRISM was initially a 64-bit architecture and had vector instructions; also included the idea of Epicode, which developed into PALcode on the Alpha
    • 32-bit address version developed as well for single-chip implementation
    • Cutler went to Microsoft after DEC cancelled the project in 1988
    • Bhandarkar published COMPCON '90 article in which it was called the "R.I.P." architecture; see also section 1.5, Alpha Implementations and Architecture, Digital Press, 1996
    • PRISM integer unit chip - Robert Conrad, et al., ISSCC 1989
    • microPRISM - Rich Witek (lead microarchitect)

  • Alpha - Dick Sites and Rich Witek
    • task force for extending VAX and VMS in 1988; Alpha design started in 1989
    • Richard Sites, Alpha AXP Architecture, Digital Technical Journal, Vol 4 No 4, 1992
    • a case history of developing the architecture was written up by R. Comerford, "How DEC developed Alpha," IEEE Spectrum, July 1992, pp. 26-31.
    • Dick Sites and Dirk Meyer, Alpha architecture video, April 1992
    • Allen Baum, Evolution of the Alpha (video), November 2000

  • implementations
    • 21064 (EV4), 1992 - Rich Witek (lead)
      • Jim Montanaro, Design of the Alpha 21064 CPU Chip video, April 1992
      • Mark Rosenbluth, Alpha 21066 video (Hot Chips V), UVC, August 1993
    • 21164 (EV5), 1995 - John Edmondson (lead during design), Pete Bannon, and Jim Keller (lead during advanced development)
      • Beth Cooper, lead cache designer; Gilbert Wolrich, FPU; Ronald Preston, instruction unit; Paul Gronowski, integer execution unit
      • IEEE Micro article
      • John Edmondson, 21164 Microarchitecture video (Hot Chips VI), August 1994
      • Gregg Bouchard and Pete Bannon, Design Objective of the 0.35-micron Alpha 21164 Microprocessor (Hot Chips 8 slides)
    • 21164PC, 1997 - Pete Bannon (lead)
    • 21264 (EV6), 1998 - Jim Keller (lead)
    • 21364 (EV7), 2003 - Pete Bannon, ...
    • 21464 (EV8) - cancelled
      • Joel Emer gave overview at PACT 2001

  • The cover art for the February 1993 special issue of CACM on "Digital's Alpha Chip Project" depicts the DEC Alpha as a 1967 FIA endurance racing Gulf Mirage M1 [a lightweight version of the Ford GT40, built by John Wyer's team] as incongruously drag racing. Two years later, Dick Sites wrote that he'd like to see Alpha thought of as an express-delivery truck -- fast but "commonplace" -- rather than as a race car -- which is "blazingly fast, but not seen in your own neighborhood". [Digital Tech. Jrnl., special 10th anniv. issue, 1995, pp. 5-6]

  • Apr. 27, 1997 - excerpt from BusinessWeek article on "Why The Fastest Chip Didn't Win":

    But even before Alpha hit the market, Digital fumbled. The company had shown off early versions of the chip at an industry conference in February, 1991, and engineers at Apple Computer Inc. were impressed. Apple was in the market for a new chip supplier, and Alpha looked promising.

    In late June, John Sculley, then Apple's CEO, invited Kenneth H. Olsen, Digital's founder and president, to dinner. Sculley had a proposition: Apple's Macintosh computers were starting to run out of gas, and he wanted to do a complete redesign with Alpha at the heart of the new Macs.

    But Olsen had doubts about Alpha. His unshakable faith in the VAX computer, which had turned Digital into IBM's most formidable competitor in the 1980s, made him reluctant to phase it out too soon in favor of Alpha. Olsen asked a team of Digital's top engineers to extend the computer's design for another generation--and he rejected Sculley's proposal.

    A few months later, Apple announced that its new Macs would run on the PowerPC chip, a competing design by IBM and Motorola Inc. Sculley says one Digital director later told him that Digital's board was ''distressed that nothing came of these discussions and that Digital lost a great opportunity.'' The Alpha faction at Digital was crestfallen. ''Ken did not want the future of the company riding on Alpha,'' says William R. Demmer, a former vice-president of Digital's Alpha and VAX businesses who retired in 1995.

  • Jan. 26, 1998 - Compaq announces plans to buy DEC

  • June 25, 2001 - Compaq cancels EV8 in order to consolidate on Itanium, and sends design team to Intel; PR release states "In one bold stroke, Compaq is extending its 10 years of leadership in 64-bit computing for the next decade and beyond."

  • Sept. 4, 2001 - HP and Compaq announce merger plans

  ---

  HP

  • HP PA-RISC 1.0 - Bill Worley (lab manager) and Michael Mahon (head of architecture team)
    • first called "Spectrum" and started by Joel Birnbaum
    • original team members: Allen Baum, Hans Jeans, Russell Kao, Ruby Lee, Michael Mahon, Terrence Miller, Steve Muchnick, and Bill Worley; later David Fotland
    • Terrence Miller - compiler mgr.; Steve Boettner - OS mgr.; Mike Gardner - hardware design mgr.; Fred Luiz - I/O mgr.; Tony Lukes - perf. analysis mgr.; Dan Magenheimer - simulator; Russell Kao - prototype; Craig Hansen - FP architecture
    • Michael Mahon, HP PA-RISC video, June 1987
    • Michael Mahon, PA-RISC Design Issues video, April 1992
    • see the feature article at HPL on "Bill Worley: A Computer Architecture Wizard"

  • implementations
    • HP 3000/840 - team led by David Fotland
    • ...

  • PA-RISC 1.1 - Michael Mahon and Jerry Huck
  • MAX-2 multi-media instructions - Ruby Lee
    • IEEE Micro article
    • Ruby Lee, Multimedia acceleration video, March 1995

  • implementations
    • PA 7000, 1989 - team
    • PA 7100 (superscalar), 1992 - team
    • PA 7100LC (superscalar, on-chip 1K icache), 1994 - team
      • Stephen Undy, 7100LC video (Hot Chips V), August 1993
      • HP Journal April 1995 issue (with PA 7100LC articles)
    • PA 7200 (superscalar, 2K on-chip dcache), 1994 - team led by David Fotland
      • HP Journal February 1996 issue (with PA 7200 articles)
    • PA 7300LC (superscalar, dual 64K on-chip caches), 1996 - team
      • HP Journal June 1997 issue (with PA 7300LC articles)

  • PA-RISC 2.0 - Michael Mahon and Jerry Huck

  • implementations
    • PA 8000 (superscalar), 1996 - team
      • IEEE Micro article
      • Ashok Kumar, The HP PA-8000 RISC CPU: A High Performance Out-of-Order Processor (Hot Chips 8 slides)
      • HP Journal August 1997 issue (with PA 8000/8200 articles)
    • PA 8200 (superscalar), 1997 - team
    • PA 8500 (superscalar, 1M + 512K on-chip caches), 1998 - team
    • PA 8600, 2000
    • PA 8700, 2001
    • PA 8800 - dual 8700 cores

  • from Joel Birnbaum's talk at 1997 Microprocessor Forum:

    "In the architecture stage, all of our work has always been done with teams, including hardware, software, and technology experts, often sitting side-by-side. At the heart of our principles is the synergy between the compiler and the hardware, with the compiler relied upon to help avoid hardware bottlenecks and critical paths, and the architectural hardware mechanisms developed to reduce stalls, delays, and critical paths in the code."

  ---

  Intergraph

  • Intergraph Clipper
    • C100, 1985 - Howard Sachs, Walt Hollingsworth, and James Cho
    • C300, 1987 -
    • C400 (superscalar), 1991 -
    • C5 - Howard Sachs and Siamak Arya
    • work abandoned in 1993

  ---

  IBM

  • 801
    • Joel Birnbaum started a project in early 1975 within the Research Division of IBM to do a machine based on John Cocke's ideas for a simple machine: load-store architecture, execute (delayed) branches, and split cache; the project took on the 801 name because the T.J. Watson Research Center building number is 801
    • John Cocke and Marty Hopkins worked on the early definition which had two- and four-byte ops and 16 GPRs
    • George Radin became manager afer Joel Birnbaum was named director of the Computer Science Dept.
    • Hardware team: Frank Carrubba (manager), Paul Stuckert, Norman Kreitzer, Richard Freitas, and Kenneth Case
    • Compiler team: Marty Hopkins (manager), Richard Goldberg, Peter Oden, Philip Owens, Peter Markstein, and Greg Chaitin
    • OS team: Richard Oehler (manager) and Albert Chang
    • Bill Worley contributed significantly through the years
    • Marty Hopkins:

      Ideas came from many sources and a lot of things were tried that didn't pan out. Examples were doing all protection in software and data base memory. We also started our own programming language, pl.8, which had an optimizing compiler. We invented the idea of doing register allocation by graph coloring. Greg Chaitin was the leader but I sometimes think that half the lab contributed ideas. The one problem Greg couldn't solve in a clean fashion was spilling when there were too few registers. I decided to see what a 32 register machine would look like. This led to all four byte ops which in turn made for a more regular machine and thus a faster cycle time. This is only one example of how software and hardware considerations were treated equally to get something better.

      "The [final] instruction formats were the same that I first drew up to accommodate 32 registers. The general flavor of decision making was collegial and informal. We also had a great crew who worked with us outside of Research. Phil Hester of IBM in Austin adopted the old 16 register machine which became Romp (RT/PC). Later on Austin did the RS/6000 with us. This was based on a Research variant called America. I can't begin to list all the people who contributed. Further ripples went out to PowerPC with Apple and Motorola as well as the AS/400 version of RS/6000. There were many variations that never saw the light of day."

    • M. Hopkins, "A Perspective on the 801/Reduced Instruction Set Computer," IBM Systems Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 1987, pp. 107-121.
    • G. Radin, "The 801 minicomputer," Proc. ASPLOS-I, Palo Alto, March 1982, pp. 39-47.

  • IBM America / Power - John Cocke, Greg Grohoski, Rich Oehler
    • arose from ideas of
      • John Cocke ( IBM Stretch [ca. 1960], IBM ACS [ca. 1967], and IBM 801 [ca. 1975])
      • Tilak Agerwala (Cheetah/Panther)
    • original America team (1985): Greg Grohoski (lead), Marc Auslander, Al Chang, Marty Hopkins, Peter Markstein, Vicky Markstein, Mark Mergen, Bob Montoye, and Dan Prener
    • quote from IBM interview with John Cocke:

      Trimble: I know that many people from IBM Research went to Austin to make the RS/6000 happen. Who were some of the players from Research?

      Cocke: Well, of course Andy Heller worked very hard on that project. He had been a very vocal proponent of RISC from day one. Al Chang contributed many, many ideas in both hardware and operating system software. In the compiler area, Peter Markstein was a source of many novel ideas, and Greg Chaitin wrote the compiler register allocator. Then there were Greg Grohoski, who did the timer work, and Fred Blount who did a lot of the overall planning.

    • quote from team member

      Greg Grohoski was a right hand man to John. [John] would call [Greg] at 1-2am to talk about the ideas. Though John had many ideas and every day, realization of those ideas would not have been possible had it not been [for the] cool analytical mind of Greg who listened to John patiently and synthesized them into reality.

    • Phil Hester, RS/6000 video, Aug. 1990
    • first commercial use of register renaming - see U.S. Patent 4,992,938, John Cocke, Gregory Grohoski, and Vojin Oklobdzija, "Instruction control mechanism for a computing system with register renaming, map table and queues indicating available registers" (February 12, 1991)

  • implementations
    • RIOS, 1989 - Greg Grohoski
      • America with IEEE floating point
      • icache and branch processing - Charles Moore (lead), Ed Broufarah, and C.C. Lee
      • integer (fixed-point) unit - Jim Kahle (lead), Larry Thatcher, Dennis Gregoire, Paul Harvey, and Brian Bakoglu
      • floating-point unit - Myhong Nguyenphu (lead), Daniel Cocanougher, Richard Fry, Pat Mills, Oscar Mitchell, and Troy Hicks
    • RSC, 1992 - Charles Moore?
    • Power2 - Greg Grohoski, Warren Maule, Larry Thatcher, and a few others
      • David Shippy, Power 2+ video (Hot Chips VI), August 1994
    • P2SC, 1997
    • switch made to 64-bit PowerPC architecture

  (see also Apple/IBM/Motorola PowerPC above)

  ---

  Intel

  • Intel iAPX 432 - Justin Rattner (chief), Roger Swanson, and George Cox
    • others involved include Kevin Kahn, Fred Pollack, Dan Hammerstrom, and Konrad Lai
    • implementation - (Steve Domenik ?)
    • an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful design that has been used to (unnecessarily, IMHO) discredit capability-based processor design
    • see the excellent post mortems:
      • Bob Colwell, Ed Gehringer, and Doug Jensen, "Performance Effects of Architectural Complexity in the Intel 432," ACM Trans. on Computer Systems, vol. 6, no. 3, August 1988, pp. 296-339.
      • Ed Gehringer and Bob Colwell, "Fast Object-Oriented Procedure Calls: Lessons From the Intel 432," ISCA-13, Tokyo, 1986, pp. 92-101.
    • also - selected April 1995 comp.arch traffic discussing the 432
    • (would be interesting to compare "capability-induced slowdown" between native IBM Power2 vs. IBM AS/400-PPC)
    • see Eric Smith's list of papers on the 432

  • i860 (see VLIW processor section)

  • i960 (see embedded processor section)

  • 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, etc. (because of market presence, see Wintel processor section)

  • IA64 / Itanium (see independence arch. processor section)

  ---

  MIPS

  • MIPS-I, 1986 - Craig Hansen, chief architect
    • much influenced by Stanford MIPS - John Hennessy
    • team members:
      • John Hennessy, Larry Weber, and Fred Chow (compilers and related ISA issues)
      • John Mashey, Mike Demoney, and Steve Stone (OS-related issues, e.g., MMU, interrupts)
      • Steve Przybylski (cache issues)
      • Chris Rowen, John Moussouris, and Skip Stritter

  • MIPS-II, 1990 - Craig Hansen, chief architect
    • with many suggestions made by Earl Killian, George Taylor, and others

  • MIPS-III (64-bit arch.), 1991 - Earl Killian, chief architect
    • John Hennessy was the impetus for MIPS III and suggested some of the ways in which it could be done.

  • MIPS-IV - Peter Hsu
    • started at SGI before the SGI/MIPS merger, although they consulted with MIPS.

  • MIPS-V (many FP opts.), 1995 - Earl Killian finalized it as the chief architect; contributions by Bill Huffman and Peter Hsu

  • MDMX, 1996 - the Digital Media ASE (Application Specific Extension)
    • The impetus for this came from Tim Van Hook and Henry Moreton within SGI. Peter Hsu participated. Several people, including Iain McClatchie and Catharine Van Ingen helped create the first architecture documents for it.

  • MIPS-V (FP paired-singles), 1996 -

  • implementations
    • R2000, 1986 - Craig Hansen, Ed Hudson, John Moussouris, Tom Riordan, Chris Rowen, and Dan Freitas
    • R2010 (FPU), 1986 - Craig Hansen, Ed Hudson, Mark Johnson, and others
    • R3000, 1988 - Craig Hansen, Tom Riordan and Ed Hudson
    • R3010 (FPU), 1988 - essentially identical to R2010
    • R6000, 1989 - George Taylor; other people involved were Mike Farmwald and Allen Roberts

    • R4000/4400, 1992 - Peter Davies, Ed Hudson, Earl Killian, and Tom Riordan (the design grew out of debates between Ed Hudson and Tom Riordan, with Peter Davies and Earl Killian serving as the referees)
      • "superpipelined" impl. of MIPS-IV - 8-stage pipeline

    • R8000 (TFP), 1994 - Peter Hsu (lead)
      • an SGI project that was folded into the MIPS product line (e.g., compare the different fused-multiply-add definitions on the R8000 and the R10000)
      • There is a direct connection of the basic ideas of the Cydrome Cydra 5 and the R8000. Very different implementations but the basic ideas were the same.
      • Cydra folks: Peter Hsu, Ross Towle, John Brennan, Jim Dehnert (and Joe Bratt joined later); Multiflow folks: Paul Rodman and John Ruttenberg
      • Peter Hsu, SGI TFP video (Hot Chips V), August 1993

    • R10000, 1996 - Chris Rowen and Ken Yeager
      • aggressive superscalar
      • IEEE Micro article)
    • R12000, 1998

    • R4200/4300, 1993 -
      • Barbara Zivkov, R4200 video (Hot Chips V), August 1993
      • adapted for Nintendo 64 (see selected game processor section)
    • R4600/4700, 1994 - Earl Killian and Tom Riordan
    • R5000, 1996 - Earl Killian and Tom Riordan
    • QED RM7000, 1997 - Tom Riordan

  ---

  Motorola 68K/88K

  • 68000, 1979 - Skip Stritter (lead architect), John Zolnowsky, and Tom Gunter (design manager)
    • Skip Stritter and David Leitch began the instruction set definition, and John Zolnowsky did most of the detailed work. The instruction set design was based heavily on Len Shustek's PhD thesis. Len, Skip, and John had worked together on their PhDs at Stanford (all under Forest Baskett?).
    • logic design and microcode - Nick Tredennick
    • bus controller - Tom Gunter
    • bus protocol and TTL breadboard - Les Crudele
    • circuit design - Doyle McAlister and Richard Crisp
    • circuit simulation - Mike Spak
    • software performance evaluation - Paul Lee
    • see E. Stritter and T. Gunter, "A Microprocessor Architecture for a Changing World: The Motorola 68000," IEEE Computer, Feb. 1979, pp. 43-52.
    • Nick Tredennick has written about the design effort in "Experiences in Commercial VLSI Microprocessor Design," Microprocessors and Microsystems, October 1988, pp. 419-432.
  • 68881/2 (FPU) - Joel Boney, Van Shahan, Ashok Someshwar (sp?), and Clay Huntsman
  • 68010, 1983 - John Zolnowsky (inst. set extensions) and Doug MacGregor (microcode)
  • 68020, 1985 - Bill Moyer, Dave Mothersole, John Zolnowsky, and Doug MacGregor (microcode)
  • 68030, 1987 - Joel Boney (architecture design manager), Doug MacGregor, Bill Moyer, and Sharon Lamb (who got things started)
    • microcode by Raju Vegesna, microcode assembler by Ed Rupp
  • 68040, 1991 - Van Shahan was the main architect
  • 68060, 1994 - Joe Circello
    • Joe Circello, 68060 video (Hot Chips VI), August 1994

  • 88100 - Mitch Alsup, Yoav Talgam, Jim Klingshirn, Carl Dobbs, Janet Sooch
    • 88200 CMMU - Mitch Alsup, Elie Haddad, Claude Moughanni, Jim Klingshirn
    • 88400 CMMU - Claude Moughanni, Terry Lawell
  • 88110 (2-way superscalar), 1991 - Keith Diefendorff (chief), Willie Anderson (graphics and FP extensions), and Bill Moyer (memory system)
  • 88120 (abandoned) - Mike Shebanow, ...

  ---

  National Semiconductor

  • National Semiconductor 32K - Dan O'Dowd and Les Kohn
    • 32016/16032 - Avraham Menachem (microarchitecture and chip design), Asher Kaminker (microcode), and Yoav Lavy (BIU, processor buses, external MMU, and interrupt controller)
    • 32332 - Ran Talmudi
    • 32532, 1987 - Uri Weiser, Don Alpert, Gigi Licht, Jonathan Levy (BIU, MMU, and dcache), and Sidi Yom Tov (design manager)
      • B. Maytal, S. Iacobovici, D. Alpert, D. Biran, J. Levy, and S.Y. Tov, "Design Considerations for a General Purpose Microprocessor," IEEE Computer, January 1989, pp. 66-76.
      • D. Alpert, J. Levy, and B. Maytal, "Architecture of the NS32532 Microprocessor," Proceedings ICCD, October 1987, pp. 168-172.
    • 32732 (a.k.a. 32764 and Swordfish, superscalar design, not delivered as N32K family member), 1991 - Don Alpert (see Swordfish web page and CompactRISC)
    • See also Oral History Panel on the Development and Promotion of the National Semiconductor 32000 Microprocessor, Donald Alpert, Subhash Bal, Robert Freund, Giora Yaron, and moderated by Richard Sanquini, February 26, 2008, Computer History Museum.
  • (see embedded processor section)

  ---

  SPARC

  • SPARC versions 7/8, 1986/1990 - Robert Garner, chief architect
    • much influenced by the UC Berkeley RISC I and RISC II work of Dave Patterson, Manolis Katevenis, and Bob Sherburne
    • started in 1984 when Bill Joy (VP of Sun R&D) brought in Dave Patterson (Berkeley RISC) as a consultant
    • webcast (Real Player) with Bill Joy discussing history of SPARC
    • v7 architecture team members: Robert Garner (chief architect), Anant Agrawal and Joan Pendleton (hardware), Steve Kleiman (operating systems), Steve Muchnick (languages), David Hough (floating point), and Bill Joy ("jack of all trades and chief tie-breaker")
    • advisors: Faye Briggs, Will Brown, John Gilmore, Dave Goldberg, Don Jackson, Tom Lyon, Masood Namjoo, Dave Patterson, Wayne Rosing, K.G. Tan, Richard Tuck, Dave Weaver, and Alex Wu
    • Steve Muchnick - compiler manager and in charge of overall performance; Steve Kleiman - Unix port technical lead; Dock Williams - Unix port; Will Brown - simulator
  • see the summer 1988 special issue of SunTechnology (vol. 1, no. 3) for "The SPARC Papers". The "/work.group" column (pp. 33-37) describes the development of the architecture. On p. 33 there is a picture of the design team around Eric Schmidt's red Ferrari. (The SPARC papers were also published as a book by Springer-Verlag, Ben Catanzaro, editor, 1991.)
  • Dave Patterson and Wayne Rosing, SPARC video, June 1989
  • in early design meetings Muchnick ruled out a graph coloring register allocator for the initial compilers, and, following Patterson's advice, a decision was made that register windows should be included in the architecture as a way to ensure that operands stayed in registers; however, by the time the first systems shipped, the Sun compilers were to a point where better register allocation was a feasible option [see D. Patterson and C. Sequin, "Retrospective: RISC I: A Reduced Instruction Set Computer," in G. Sohi (ed.), 25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture: Selected Papers, ACM Press, 1998]

  • implementations
    • 16.67 MHz Fujitsu gate-array, 1986
      • IU (MB86900) - Anant Agarwal and Masood Namjoo
      • FP control (MB86910, controlled two Weitek data path chips) - Don Jackson
      • processor board for Sun 4/200 - Robert Garner and Ed Kelly

    • 33 MHz Cypress 7C600, 1990
      • IU (CY7C601) -
      • FP control (CY7C608, controlled TI FPU chip) -

    • Metaflow Lightning/Thunder
      • Bruce Lightner, Thunder video (Hot Chips VI), 1994
      • see Metaflow web page

    • MicroSPARC, 1991 -
    • MicroSPARC 2, 1994 -

    • TI SuperSPARC (Viking), 1992 - Greg Blanck
    • TI SuperSPARC 2, 1995 -

    • Ross HyperSPARC, 1993 - Raju Vegesna (spec) and Jim Monaco (simulator)
      • Generation 1: Pinnacle -> Colorado 3 -- Peter Jewett, Greg Gregorio, Sarangan Padalkar, Haytham Samarchi, Mike Seningen, Sang Yoo
        • Pinnacle - 55, 60, 66 MHz versions in Cypress 0.65 micron
        • Colorado 1 - 90, 100 MHz versions in Fujitsu 0.50 micron
        • Colorado 2 - 125 MHz version in Fujitsu 0.45 micron
        • Colorado 3 - 150, 166 MHz versions in Fujitsu 0.40 micron
      • Generation 2: Colorado 4 - Colorado 5 (new sequencer and on-chip data cache) -- Mitch Alsup, Greg Gregorio, Sarangan Padalkar, Haytham Samarchi
        • Colorado 4 - 180, 200 MHz versions in Fujitsu 0.35 micron
        • Colorado 5 - 250+ MHz versions in NEC 0.25 micron

    • Fujitsu TurboSPARC, 1996

  • SPARC version 9
    • a large committee with over 100 meetings
    • major contributors - Dave Ditzel (chairman), Joel Boney (vice chairman, and chairman at the end), Dave Weaver, Winfried Wilcke, Robert Yung, Bill Joy, Steve Chessin, Steve Krueger, and Steve Kleiman
    • Dave Ditzel, SPARC Version 9 video, Sept. 1992
    • "In 1991 [Bill Joy] did the basic pipeline design of UltraSparc-I and its multimedia processing features.... More recently, Bill has led design investigations of architectures for UltraSparc V...." (from executive bios at Sun)

  • implementations
    • Sun UltraSPARC I, 1995 - Les Kohn, Marc Tremblay, Guillermo Maturana, and Robert Yung
      • IEEE Micro article
      • Robert Yung, "Evaluation of a Commercial Microprocessor," PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, SMLI TR-98-65, June 1998. [describes the design decisions for UltraSPARC]
    • UltraSPARC II, 1997 - Les Kohn, Marc Tremblay
    • UltraSPARC IIi - Kevin Normoyle
    • UltraSPARC III, 2000 - Gary Lauterbach
    • UltraSPARC IIIi - Kevin Normoyle
    • UltraSPARC-IIIi+ - Samsong Wong
    • UltraSPARC IV - started by Bill Lynch, then Joe Chamdani, then Quinn Jacobson with the help of Gary Lauterbach
    • UltraSPARC IV+ - major redesign done by Quinn Jacobson and finished by Dale Greenley
    • UltraSPARC V (cancelled) - Dan Leibholz, Wayne Yamamoto, and Rick Hetherington
    • UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) - initially done by Les Kohn and Kunle Olukotun, with help of William Bryg and Poonacha Kongetira; after the Afara acquisition, the chief architect role was moved to Rick Hetherington
    • Niagara2 and 3 - Rick Hetherington
    • Rock - chief architects Marc Tremblay and Shailender Chaudhry

    • HaL SPARC64, 1995 - Hisashige Ando (design manager), Winfried Wilcke, and Mike Shebanow
    • HaL SPARC64 V (abandoned) - Mike Shebanow and ...
      • eight-way ooo issue, trace cache, value prediction, ...
      • Mike Shebanow (video), December 1999
      • cancelled in 2001

    • Fujitsu SPARC64GP, 1999 (further development of Hal SPARC64) - Takato Noda, Takumi Maruyama
    • Fujitsu SPARC64 V, 2003 (new design based on GS8800B) - Aiichiro Inoue, Takeo Asakawa
    • Fujitsu SPARC64 V+, 2004 - Aiichiro Inoue, Yuji Yoshida
    • Fujitsu SPARC64 VI, 2007 (2 cores on a chip) - Aiichiro Inoue, Takumi Maruyama, Takeo Asakawa

  • VIS, 1995 - Les Kohn, G. Maturana, Marc Tremblay, A. Prabhu, and G. Zyner, with early contributions by Tim van Hook, Robert Yung, and Bill Joy
    • IEEE Micro article

  ---

  Three Rivers

  • PERQ - Brian Rosen, etc.
    • microprogrammable, came with P-code variant interpreter
    • PERQ-1, 1980
    • PERQ T-1, 1981
    • PERQ T-2, 1982

  ---

  Weitek

  • XL processor - Craig Hansen
  • 1064/65/66/67 (FP data paths) - Craig Hansen
    • used for both the original SPARC and MIPS R2000 implementations

  ---

  Xerox

  • Alto, 1973 - Chuck Thacker (primary designer), also Ed McCreight, Butler Lampson, Bob Sproull, and Dave Boggs
  • D*-series - Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and Ron Rider
    • Mesa byte-coded instruction set was designed by Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker
    • D0, 1978 - Dolphin was TTL version
    • D1, 1979 - Dorado was ECL version
    • Dicentra - diskless router
    • Daybreak (6085)
    • Daisy - VLSI version, never manufactured
    • B Lampson and K. Pier, "A Processor for a High-Performance Personal Computer," ISCA, 1980
    • K. Pier, "A Retrospective on the Dorado, a High-Performance Personal Computer," ISCA, 1983 [lists project personnel]
  • Star (8010), 1981
    • AMD 29K bitslice implementation was called "Dandelion", based on Butler Lampson "Wildflower" design, and ran a Mesa virtual machine
    • Jeff Johnson, et al., "The Xerox 'Star': A Retrospective," IEEE Computer, September 1989

  ---

  Zilog

  • Z8000 - Bernard Peuto (architect)
    • Masatoshi Shima (logic designer); Hiroshi Yonezawa (MMU); Ross Freeman (peripherals); also contributions by Judy Estrin
    • B. Peuto, "Architecture of a New Microprocessor," IEEE Computer, Feb. 1979, pp. 10-21.
    • M. Shima, "Demystifying Microprocessor Design," IEEE Spectrum, July 1979, pp. 22-30.
  • Z80,000 - John Banning and Don Alpert
    • D. Alpert, "Powerful 32-Bit Micro Includes Memory Management," Computer Design, October 1983, pp. 213-220.

  ---

  Selected early workstations

  need intro...

  ---

  Apollo (see Apollo entry in workstation processor section)

  ---

  Masscomp (later Concurrent)

  • first real-time UNIX box dual 68K's to deal with the page fault issue
  • MC500/DP first multiprocessor UNIX box (asymmetric)
  • Series 700 first SMP UNIX box

  ---

  Tektronix

  • Magnolia, 1979 - Clem Cole and Roger Bates
    • first multi-68K based graphics workstation but problems in moving to product
    • later sold as a Smalltalk workstation

  ---

  Three Rivers (see Three Rivers PERQ entry in workstation processor section)

  ---

  Xerox (see Xerox entry in workstation processor section)

  ---

  Multimedia processors

  ... more to do!

  ---

  Chromatic Research

  • MPact 1, 1995 - Steve Purcell
    • IEEE Micro article
    • Paul Kalapathy, Hardware/Software Interaction on the Mpact Media Processor (Hot Chips 8 slides)
    • Mediaware firmware was a year late, but recently specialized firmware was developed for DVD in three months and will be used by Gateway
  • MPact 2, 1997 -
    • doubles the clock speed from 62 to 125 MHz, adds a 32-bit floating-point unit, 35-stage 3-D pipeline, and 2 KB of texture cache
    • Toshiba will use MPact 2 core in embedded DRAM with low power
  • Chromatic was acquired by ATI in 1998

  ---

  Equator / Hitachi

  • MAP 1000 (Media Accelerated Processor), 1998
    • company founded by John O'Donnell (Multiflow), Ben Cutler (Multiflow), and Yatin Mundkur (SUN/Ross)
    • compilers - Doug Gilmore (Multiflow), Tom Karzes (Multiflow and MicroUnity), and Jason Eckhardt (Convex)
    • several variants
      • MAP 1000A / 1000TM
      • MAP 3D, 1999 - for 3D graphics pipeline
      • MAP CA, 2000 - for consumer applications (e.g., HDTV)
      • MAP BSP, 2001 - for broadband signal processing
    • acquired by Pixelworks in 2005

  ---

  MicroUnity

  • MicroUnity MediaProcessor - Craig Hansen
    • IEEE Micro article

  ---

  Philips

  • TriMedia - Gert Slavenburg
    • evolved from LIFE processor
    • Gerrit A. Slavenburg, Selliah Rathnam, and Henk Dijkstra, The Trimedia TM-1 PCI VLIW Mediaprocessor (Hot Chips 8 slides)

  ---

  Wintel processors

  Because of the large market for x86-compatible processors, this is a special section devoted to processor within that market. See Christain Ludloff's sandpile.org for detailed information on particular chips.

  ---

  AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)

  • AMD K5, 1996 - Mike Johnson
    • IEEE Micro article
  • AMD/NexGen K6, 1997 - Greg Favor
    • AMD started internal K6 work as an extension of the K5 base, but this was discarded in favor of buying NexGen and using their Nx686 design relabelled as K6
    • see The Anatomy of a High-Performance Microprocessor (K6-2 3D-Now! case study)
    • AMD K6-2, 1998
    • AMD K6-III, 1999
  • AMD Athlon (K7), 1999 - Dirk Meyer (Dir. Engr.), Fred Weber, ...

  • x86-64 architecture - Kevin McGrath and Dave Christie
    • Kevin McGrath, x86-64 architecture (video), September 2000

  • AMD Opteron (K8), 2003 - Jim Keller and then Fred Weber
    • Jim Keller left and the initial K8 design was canceled
    • Fred Weber led the project to revise the K7 into a 64-bit core

  ---

  Cyrix (see IDT/Centaur/VIA below)

  • Cyrix 486 chips, 1992 - Mark Bluhm and Ty Garibay
  • 5x86 (M1sc), 1995 - Mark Bluhm and Ty Garibay
  • 5gx86 (MediaGX), 1997 - Forrest Norrod
  • 6x86 (M1), 1996 - Mark Bluhm and Ty Garibay
    • in-order, native x86 superscalar design
    • dual pipelines
    • register renaming
  • 6x86MX / MII (M2), 1997 - Dan Green
    • M1 core with a new memory subsystem and BTB, and added the MMX instructions
    • Robert Maher, Multimedia Instruction Set Extensions for a 6th Generation Processor (Hot Chips 8 slides)
    • name became MII after National Semi acquisition; MII had a few minor changes from original M2
  • Cayenne core (ca. 1997) - dual issue of FXCH in FP/MMX unit
    • MXi (graphics integrated with Cayenne core), 1997 - Doug Beard
  • first VIA Cyrix III (Joshua, Jedi, Gobi)
    • based on native x86 Cayenne core
    • dropped in June 2000 in favor of Centaur WinChip/C5/Samuel
  • MIII (M3, Jalapeno core, Mojave), 2000 - Ty Garibay and Mike Shebanow started the design (1994-1997) and then Greg Grohoski took over the project
    • out-of-order, decoupled design (translate x86 to uops)
    • cancelled in March, 2000

    [Cyrix was formed in 1988 by a group of ex-TI folks. Initial products were floating-point coprocessors. National Semi bought Cyrix in Novermber 1997 for $550M. National announced in May 1999 that it intended to sell Cyrix. Via bought Cyrix in June 1999 (after renegotiating the price from $300M to $167M) and then bought Centaur in August 1999 for $51M. Cyrix was in Richardson, TX, and had approx. 330 staff size, while Centaur was in Austin, TX, and had approx. 60 staff size. Supposedly Cyrix had a burn rate of $10M/month at the time of the acquisition. Most of the Cyrix folks left or were laid off after the acquisition.]

  ---

  IDT / Centaur / VIA

  • IDT-C6 (WinChip), 1997 - Terry Parks and Glenn Henry
    • scalar issue, decoupled design (translate x86 into uops)
    • 6 pipe stages
  • WinChip 2 (C2, C6+), 1998
  • WinChip 3 (C3) - sampled but never shipped
  • WinChip 4 (C4) - design with 11 pipe stages reported in MPF
  • Cyrix III (Samuel, C5, C5A), 2000 - Glenn Henry, ...
    • 12 pipe stages
    • C5B / Samuel II
    • C5C / Ezra
    • C5M / Ezra-T
    • Matthew (integrated graphics)
  • Via C3 / Nehemiah (C5X), 2003 - Glenn Henry, ...
    • 16 pipe stages
    • MMX units operate out-of-order
    • Via Antaur - mobile
    • Via C3 - desktop
    • Via Eden - embedded
  • CY (Esther)
  • CZA

  ---

  Intel

  • Intel 8086 and 8088, 1978 - Stephen Morse and Bruce Ravenel
    • S.P. Morse, B.W. Ravenel, S. Mazor, and W.B. Pohlman, "Intel Microprocessors -- 8008 to 8086," IEEE Computer, October 1980, pp. 42-60. From the acknowledgements section:

      Many people played significant roles in the development of these processors. Hence, it is not possible to single out a few for all the credit. However, if forced to choose those people who played the most significant roles on each chip, we can name the following: M.E. (Ted) Hoff was the architect and Federico Faggin the chip designer of the 4004. Stanley Mazor contributed to the 4004 architecture as well as to the architectures of the 8008 and 8080. Hoff and Hal Feeney were the major contributors to the 8008 development. Faggin managed the development of the 8080 and participated in defining its architecture, with Masatoshi Shima doing the logic and circuit design. Roger Swanson defined the new instructions for the 8085 while Peter Stoll and Andrew Volk performed the 8085 logic and circuit design. The 8086 architecture was defined by Stephen Morse and refined by Bruce Ravenel, with James McKevitt and John Bayliss responsible for the logic and circuit design. William Polhman managed both the 8085 and 8086 activities.

    • "Stephen Morse: Father of the 8086 Processor," Benj Edwards, PC World, June 16, 2008
  • 8087 (FPU) - John Palmer (chief), with significant contributions by William Kahan, and implementation led by Bruce Ravenel
  • 80186 - (Jim McKevitt?)
  • 80286, 1982 - Bob Childs
  • 80287 (FPU) - derived from 8087

  • Intel IA32 - John Crawford and Patrick Gelsinger
  • MMX extensions - Uri Weiser (chief), Alex Peleg (lead), Bob Dryer, Larry Mennemeier, David Bistry, and Millind Mittal
    • Uri Weiser, Trade-off Considerations and Performance of Intel's MMX Technology (Hot Chips 8 slides)

  • SSE extensions -
  • SSE2 extensions -

  • implementations
    • 80386, 1985 - John Crawford (chief), Jim Slager
      • See Intel 386 Microprocessor Design and Development, Oral History Panel, Computer History Museum, 2008, with participants John Crawford, Gene Hill, Jill Leukhardt, Jan Willem Prak, and Jim Slager
    • 80387 (FPU) - derived from 80287
    • 80486, 1989 - John Crawford (chief)
    • Pentium (P5), 1993
      • Architecture/performance team: Don Alpert (chief), Jack Mills, and Bob Dreyer
        • The initial superscalar definition and feasibility study for the Pentium integer pipeline was done by Uri Weiser, Yaakov Yaari, and David Perlmutter at Intel's Haifa Design Center in late 1988 / early 1989.
        • Don Alpert and his team in Santa Clara extended this superscalar framework in spring 1989.
      • FPU: complete redesign of all algorithms and microarchitecture by Harsh Sharangpani with contributions by William Kahan and Peter Tang
      • microarchitecture: Ed Grochowski (integer), Ken Shoemaker (integer), Harsh Sharangpani (floating point), and Gary Hammond (protected mode)
      • John Crawford, Don Alpert, and Beatrice Fu, Pentium overview video, June 1993
      • Daniel Deleganes, Pentium 90/100 video (Hot Chips VI), August 1994
      • Patrick Gelsinger, Desmond Kirkpatrick, Avinoam Kolodny, and Gadi Singer, "Coping with the Complexity of Microprocessor Design at Intel – A CAD History" [covers 1971 to 1993; also appears as "Such a CAD!," IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, Summer 2010, pp. 32-43.]
    • Pentium Pro (P6), 1995 - Bob Colwell (chief), Glenn Hinton (senior), Dave Papworth (senior), Michael Fetterman, and Andy Glew
      • IEEE Micro article
      • Univ. of Pittsburg article on Colwell and P6 concept team
      • The Pentium Chronicles
    • Pentium w/MMX (P55), 1996 - also includes PPro branch prediction
      • Michael Kagan, The P55C Microarchitecture: The First Implementation of MMX Technology (Hot Chips 8 slides)
    • Pentium II, 1997 - P6 core
    • Pentium III, 1999 - P6 core, adds SSE
      • Michael Kagan, The P55C Microarchitecture: The First Implementation of MMX Technology (Hot Chips 8 slides)
    • Pentium 4, 2001 - Glenn Hinton (chief), Darrell Boggs, Douglas Carmean, Patrice Roussel (lead on floating point), Dave Sager, and Michael Upton
      • new core, also adds SSE2
      • initial design leadership by Bob Colwell, Glenn Hinton, and Dave Papworth
      • 30+ pipeline stages (20 disclosed in "branch misprediction pipeline")
      • trace cache, 2-way multithreaded
    • Pentium M, 2003 - Simcha Gochman
      • low-power revision of P6 core, adds SSE2, fused uops
    • Core microarchitecture (NGMA), 2006 - (Ofri Wechsler mgr.?)
    • Atom microarchitecture, 2008 - Belli Kuttanna

  • P7, 1991-1994 (RISC-like 64-bit architecture definition effort; led to Itanium)
    • Don Alpert (chief architect)
    • Gary Hammond (protected mode)
    • Hans Mulder (integer)
    • Harsh Sharangpani (floating point and lead microarchitect)
    • Ken Shoemaker (x86 compatibility)

  • IA64 / Itanium (see independence arch. processor section)

  ---

  NexGen

  • Nx586 (F86), 1995 - Mack McFarland was the first architect, then Dave Stiles and Greg Favor worked on the design, and later Korbin Van Dyke oversaw the implementation
    • NexGen was a startup funded by Compaq, ASCII, and Kleiner Perkins (founder was Thampy Thomas); Nick Tredennick hired and managed the original engineering team; people who followed Nick included Atiq Raza and Dave Epstein (who led the chip into full production, 1990-1995)
    • the F86 was described at 1989 Compcon and later renamed Nx586, it required a FP coprocessor
    • NexGen was bought by AMD in 1995
  • NexGen Nx686 (see AMD K6 above in this section)
    • Keith Diefendorff was hired as director of technical strategy at NexGen in 1995 and worked on Nx686 at NexGen and then at AMD until 1996

  ---

  Rise

  • mP6, 1998 - Ken Munsen

  ---

  Transmeta

  • Crusoe, 2000
    • internal 4-way VLIW, masked by code morphing software
    • Dave Ditzel, Transmeta Crusoe (video), February 2000
    • L. Geppert and T. Perry, Transmeta's Magic Show," IEEE Spectrum, 37(5), May 2000, pp. 26-33.
  • Efficeon, 2003
    • internal 8-way VLIW, masked by code morphing software

  ---

  LISP processors

  need intro... MIT CONS machine, then CADR ...
  Richard Greenblatt: The LISP Machine. November 1974
  Tom Knight: CONS. November 1974
  F. Knight, Jr., David A. Moon, Jack Holloway and Guy L. Steele, Jr.: CADR, May 1979

  ---

  Symbolics

  • LM-2, 1980 - repackaged MIT CADR
  • L-machine (3600), 1982 - Tom Knight, Bruce Edwards, Chris Terman
  • G-machine, 1984 - 3600 architecture in gate arrays
  • I-machine (Ivory), 1987 - single-chip processor, also used as a coprocessor by others

  ---

  LISP Machines, Inc. (LMI)

  • LMI-CADR, 1980 - same as the MIT CADR
  • LMI-LAMBDA, 1983 - CADR combined with a 68010
  • K-machine, 1986 - Bruce Deffenbaugh, Joe Marshall, Robert Powell, and Simon Willison
    • new design, not descended from CADR
    • hardware implementation by Robert Powell, Bruce Deffenbaugh, and Kent Hoult

  ---

  Texas Instruments

  • Explorer, 1983 - Keith Diefendorff
  • Explorer-II, 1987 - Keith Diefendorff

  ---

  Xerox

  • 1185 / 1186, 1985 - based on D-series (see Xerox entry in workstation processor section)

  ---

  Java processors

  need intro...

  ---

  Patriot Scientific Corp.

  • PSC1000, 1997 -
    • 100 MHz, $10 in high volumes

  ---

  Rockwell

  • JEM1 - ? (Nick Mykris, mgr. of adv. uproc. section)
    • 50 MHz, 60 mW, based on AAMP rather than picoJava core

  ---

  Sun JavaChips

  • picoJava - Mike O'Connor, Marc Tremblay, Bill Joy
    • core design for use in other chips, treated as IP
    • IEEE Micro article
    • Marc Tremblay and Michael O'Connor, PicoJava: A hardware Implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (Hot Chips 8 slides)
      
  • microJava 701, 1998 -
  • ultraJava, ca. '98-99 - Marc Tremblay, Bill Joy
  • Marc Tremblay, MAJC architecture (video), March 2000

  ---

  Other language-based processors

  need intro...

  ---

  Rational

  • R1000, 1984 - Mike Devlin and Dave Stevenson
    • Rational was founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981; Dave Bernstein joined to lead the development team a year later
    • R1000 was a microcoded design to support Ada, see US 4,791,550
    • four models of the R1000 were designed (series 100, 200, 300, and 400; series 400 schematics and other documents have been placed online by the Danish Data Historical Society)
    • Rational sold about 300 machines in total; a decision was made in 1990 to leave the hardware business and concentrate on software products
    • Grady Booch described the machine:

      The R1000 was a horizontally microprogrammed machine with a 67 bit single level virtual address space. This machine was in essence a dual stack-based processor, with computation done on one path and type checking on another. The R1000 was effectively a DIANA machine (DIANA being the Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada, a formal intermediate representation for the language). We didn't store source code: source code was simply a pretty-printing of the DIANA tree. Using DIANA with hardware acceleration made it possible to do incremental compilation (unheard of at the time, for strongly typed languages), easy refactoring (though that word had not yet been invented), and incredibly fast integration (essential for the large systems that we being built with Ada).

  ---

  Stack processors

  The credit for collecting information in this section goes to Phil Koopman. He has found lots of designs but most with relatively low sales volume. Phil has a web page that points to current sales sources of stack processors.

  ---

  Echelon

  • Neuron, 1990 - Bruce Eisenhard
    • 8-bit, 3-way multithreaded communication microcontroller
    • sold as Motorola MC1431x0 and as Toshiba TMPN31x0

  ---

  Harris

  • RTX 2000 (based on Novix NC6000 design), 1987 - John Rible and Chris Malinowski
    • John Rible added on to the design of Novix NC4016 to create the NC6000 for Novix. Novix then licensed the design to Harris Semiconductor.
    • Chris Malinowski of Harris changed the NC6000 into a family of microcontrollers: RTX 2000, RTX 2001, RTX 2010.
    • Phil Koopman's description of the RTX 2000

  ---

  Novix

  • NC4016, 1985 - Chuck Moore (architect) with help from Bob Murphy and Greg Bailey
    • 16-bit, original "Forth Chip"
    • Implemented on a 4000-gate gate array
    • Phil Koopman's description of the NC4016
  • NC6000, 1987 - John Rible (see Harris RTX 2000 above)

  ---

  Embedded processors

  more to do... (Phil Koopman describes this market in his 1996 ICCD paper.)

  ---

  AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)

  • 29000-derived (see workstation processor section)
    • 29030 - 2-bus, 8k icache, no dcache, interrupt controller, timer, jtag
    • 29035 - 2-bus, 4K icache, no dcache, interrupt controller, timer, jtag
    • 29040 - 2-bus, 8K icache, 4k dcache, interrupt controller, timer, jtag, hardware multiply
    • 29200 - 29000 core with parallel and serial ports, DMA, interrupt controller, DRAM, memory decode, and interface to laser printer engines
    • 29205 - slightly reduced function version of 29200
    • 29240 - like a 29200, with 4K icache, 2K dcache, hardware multiply, 16 entry MMU
    • 29245 - like a 29200, with 4K icache, 16 entry MMU
    • 29243 - like a 29240, 32 entry MMU, DRAM parity, no printer engine I/F
  • x86-derived
    • Elan -

  ---

  ARM (Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd.)

  • ARM - Sophie Wilson (Also involved: Dave Jaggar wrote the ARMv4 Architecture book, David Seal oversaw the arithmetic, and Edward Nevill selected the Thumb opcodes after the basic idea was conceived by Dave Jaggar.)
    • ARM1, 1985 - Steve Furber (who now works at Manchester University on asynchronous ARMs called Amulet)
    • ARM2, 1986 - Steve Furber
    • ARM3, 1989 - Alasdair Thomas
    • [There was no ARM4 or ARM5. Apple's Larry Tesler suggested a direct move to ARM6 for marketing reasons (the 486 and 68040 had been around for some time) and a consistent naming scheme - ARM6 for the core, ARM60 for a CPU chip (e.g. in the 3DO machine), ARM610 for an enhanced CPU with a cache (e.g. in the Newton or Acorn RiscPC). This scheme was later extended so that 4 digits is a deeply embedded processor with peripherals - most of these are based on ARM7 (ARM7500, ARM7500FE, ARM7110) with a couple of StrongARM1 based ones (SA1100, SA1500). Under this naming scheme, ARM1 would have been ARM10, ARM2 would have been ARM20, ARM3 would have been ARM200 (ARM2 plus cache) and ARM250 would have been ARM2500.]
    • ARM 6(10), 1993 - Alasdair Thomas
    • ARM 7(10), 1994 - Dave Jaggar (7 core) and Simon Watt (710 cpu)
      • ARM7TDMI - Dave Jaggar (architect) and Keith Clarke (implementation)
      • ARM7500FE - Peter Harrod
    • ARM 8(10), 1995 - Guy Larri and Neil Robinson
      • Guy Larri, ARM810: Dancing to the Beat of a Different Drum (Hot Chips 8 slides)
    • ARM9(10,40) - Ian Devereux, Guy Larri
    • ARM10 - Dave Jaggar, Gerard Williams, Chris Hinds (floating-point), Raney Southerland (implementation)
    • ARMFPA10 - Pete Harrod
    • ARMFPA11 - Peter Harrod and David Seal
    • ARMVFP10 - Chris Hinds, Dave Jaggar, Eric Schorn (implementation)
    • ARM11 - Richard Grisenthwaite, Ian Deveraux, Chris Hinds (floating-point)
    • Cortex A8 - Gerard Williams, Raney Southerland (implementation), Chris Hinds (floating-point)

    • (see also DEC StrongARM)

  ---

  DEC

  • StrongARM
    • StrongARM 110, 1996 - Rich Witek (lead), Greg Hoepnner, Ray Stephany, Jim Montanaro, +
      • Sribalan Santhanam, StrongArm 110: A 160MHz 32b 0.5W CMOS ARM Processor (Hot Chips 8 slides)
    • StrongARM 1100, 1997 - Rich Witek (lead microarchitect), Ray Stephany (implementation)
    • as part of a lawsuit settlement between DEC and Intel, Intel acquired StrongARM and the DEC design team left
    • Intel StrongArm page
    • (see also Intel XScale)

  ---

  Hitachi

  • SuperH RISC -
    • SH-1/SH-2, 1993 -
    • SH-3, 1994 -
    • SH-4, 1997 -

  ---

  Intel

  • Intel 8051 - ? (8-bit?, check on this)

  • Intel x86 derived
    • ...

  • Intel i960 - Glen Myers
    • original implementation -
    • ...
    • i960 CA (superscalar), 1989 - Glenn Hinton and Frank Smith
    • i960 MM -
    • ...
    • SA,SB,KA,KB,JA,CF
    • HD,HT - Jay Heeb and Tim Jehl microarchitecture
    • R series has I2O
    • ...
    • i960 JX -
      • Richard Brunner, i960JX video (Hot Chips VI), August 1994
    • ...
    • i960 CA/MM/JX comparison

  • XScale
    • XScale core and 80200 processor - Tom Adelmeyer (architecture), Steve Strazdus and Paul Meyer (microarchitecture)

  ---

  MIPS

  • MIPS-II-derived (32-bit, see workstation processor section)
  • MIPS-16 (32-bit data/16-bit compressed instructions), 1996 - Earl Killian and Hartvig Ekner

  ---

  Motorola / Freescale

  • 68000-derived
    • 68060 (see workstation processor section)
    • 68300 (??)
  • Coldfire - Joe Circello
    • Motorola Unfolds ColdFire Roadmap, Microprocessor Report, September 16, 1996 [check if on-line]
    • ColdFire: A Hot Architecture, Byte, May 1995 [get link to on-line copy]
    • 5102, 1995 -
    • 520x? -
  • m-core - Brian Lucas, Kent Moat, Mike Schuette, Ray Essick, Bill Moyer, and Hunter Scales.
    • 1997
  • PowerPC-derived
    • 400 series ...
    • 500 series ...
    • 602?
    • 800 series ...

  ---

  National Semiconductor

  • Embedded versions of National Semiconductor 32K
    • NS32CG16 (Guppy) - based on the original 32016 without MMU support but with added software and hardware bitblt support, used in the Canon LBP printer
    • NS32CG160 (Shark) - uses same core as Guppy (CG) and adds timers, DMAC, and ICU; designed for LBP
    • NS32FX16 (Goldfish, a.k.a. Wanda) - used the CG core and added a DSP accelerator designed specifically for fax applications where the integer machine will do the printing and the DSP part will do a soft modem
    • NS32FX164/161 and 32FV16 (with various on-chip RAM and Sigma-Delta codec configurations, Goldfish-II) - used the same core as Goldfish but with a more aggressive DSP accelerator, biggest success was as the sole processing unit within the HP OfficeJet (responsible for everything starting with the modem and ending with rendering and printing)
    • NS32AM160/161/162/163 - all with the same processing units as the Goldfish-II and added circuitry required to implement a Digital Answering Machine, first or one of the first full system-on-a-chip solutions, with biggest success being the whole family of AT&T digital answering machines
    • NS32GX320 (Barracuda) - used the 32532 core minus the on-chip MMU, used in multifunction peripherals
  • CompactRISC - CR16A and CR32A done by Gideon Intrater, and CR16B done by Alon Naveh
    • CompactRISC is a load/store architecture with a fixed-length instruction format that implements a very small subset of the original NS32K instruction set. Traps are treated similarly; but the register file is significantly larger. Additionally, there are some new DSP instructions and a new calling convention.
    • See also D. Alpert, A. Averbuch, and O. Danieli, "Performance comparison of load/store and symmetric instruction set architectures," ISCA-17, Seattle, 1990, pp. 172-181.
    • Implementations
      • NS32SF641 - essentially the Swordfish design changed to implement the CompactRISC inst. set - Gideon Intrater took over responsibility for the design after Don Alpert left for Intel
      • Piranha, 1995 - Gideon Intrater
      • HPC (embedded 16-bit) - Ralph Haines
  • Intel x86 derived
    • NS486 embedded controller - Mario Nemirovsky & others

  ---

  Rockwell

  • AAMP -
  • JEM1 (see Java processor section)

  ---

  Transputer

  • Transputer - Iann Barron (main), David May, Roger Shepherd, and Peter Thompson
    • Iann Barron was the main architect and was responsible for putting the team together and providing the concepts.
    • David May provided the principal details of the transputer instruction set, its communications, and the occam language.
    • Roger Shepherd, under David May's guidance, provided the details of the timer.
    • Peter Thompson developed the communications architecture of IEEE 1355, with its simple but flexible virtual channels and hardware routing technology.
    • "All the ideas were bounced off other people, many of whom contributed by asking awkward questions, finding holes in what was proposed, simply writing down what was proposed, trying to implement it and finding awkwardnesses that needed to be cleaned up, and even asking customers what they wanted. But none of these people would have come together without Iann Barron."
  • implementations
    • various test chips
    • T2 -
    • T4 - Guy Harriman
    • T8 - Mark Homewood
    • T9 - Brian Parsons

    • T9000 (1988-1993)
      • Overall Manager: Clive Dyson
      • Chief architect: Roger Shepherd (with help from Dave May)
      • Communications: Pete Thompson/Rob Simpson
      • DSLink (IEEE 1355 and also in 1394 [firewire]): Robert Simpson
      • CPU pipelining: Brian Parsons
      • Implementation team leaders:
        • CPU: Peter Barnes (microcode), Dave Greenhill (datapath)
        • Cache/memory crossbar: Richard Gammack
        • External memory interface: Mike Boland
        • FPU: Simon Knowles
        • Communications: Rob Simpson
      • May, Shepherd, and Thompson, "The T9000 Transputer," ICCD 1992
    • ST20 embedded processor (SOC) (1992-1995)
      • originally known as RMC (re-usable micro core)
      • Overall manager: Bob Krysiak
      • Architect: Rob Simpson
      • Implementors:
        • Andy Harley (microcode)
        • Steve Felix (ALU)
        • Graham Matthew (Memory system and system interconnect)
    • ST20-C1 - Dave Shepherd and Julian Lewis

    • Transputer archive
    • Geoff Barrett, "Formal methods applied to a floating point number system" [for T800]

  ---

  DSP processors

  to be done - DSP architectures include special instructions for processing digital signal data

  The following early history of DSP chips given by Murat Kunt, Swiss Federal Inst. of Tech., at the 1990 CERN School of Computing

  1978 AMI S2811
  1979 Intel 2920/21 (telecomm)
  1979 Bell Labs DSP 1 (internal)
  1980 NEC uPD7720
  1980 Analog Devices ADSP-2100
  1981 IBM Hermes (internal)
  1982 Hitachi 61810
  1982 Texas Instruments 32010

  representative chips
  GP DSPs: AT&T DSP16, DSP32; Motorola DSP56116, DSP5600x, DSP 9600x; TI TMS320Cxx; Analog Devices 2100
  Digital filter specific DSPs: INMOS A100, LSI64240, Motorola DSP56200, Zoran
  FFT specific DSPs: TRW2310, HDSP66110, UT69532, Zoran

  ---

  Texas Instruments

  • TMS320 series
    • The speech synthesis chip developed by George L. Brantingham and Richard H. Wiggins in 1978 (U.S. Patent No. 4,209,844 granted in 1980) was the beginning of TI's DSP efforts. It used an on-chip 8-bit digital-to-analog converter to transform digital information processed through the filter into synthetic speech. It used a multistage multiplier and accumulator architecture.
    • TMS320C3x - first 32-bit single-chip floating-point DSP
    • TMS320C4x - first multiprocessing DSP easily interconnectable in various configurations of meshes, grids, rings, etc.
    • TMS320C6x - first single-chip 8-wide-VLIW DSP (see VLIW processor section)

  ---

  Selected game processors

  ... more to do

  ---

  Nintendo 64

  • main processor is a MIPS R4300 (slightly modified)
  • Reality Co Processor (RCP) - team effort
    • Mary Jo Doherty was the lead designer for the (RSP) signal processor portion of the chip
    • Phil Gossett was the lead designer for the (RDP) graphics portion of the chip
    • Tim van Hook brought many ideas to the RCP from his earlier work with the "MIPS Multi Media Engine"

  ---

  Sony Playstation 2

  • Masaaki Oka and Masakazu Suzuoki, "Programming the Emotion Engine," IEEE Micro, Vol.19, No. 6, November/December 1999

  ---

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to the following for their help in identifying some of the folks listed above and telling me about the projects in which they were involved: John Ahlstrom, Don Alpert, Carl Alsing, Mitch Alsup, Steve Anderson, Tom Anderson, Siamak Arya, Pete Bannon, Allen Baum, Rich Belgard, Dave Bernstein, Mark Bluhm, Joel Boney, David Boreham, David Boundy, Henry Burkhardt III, Brian Case, Clem Cole, Bob Colwell, Chuck Corley, Charlie Crabb, Jim Dehnert, Marvin Denman, Keith Diefendorff, Jason Eckhardt, John Edmondson, Dave Epstein, Eric Fischer, Russell Fish, Alan Folmsbee, David Fotland, Philip Freidin, Robert Garner, Doug Gilmore, Ivan Godard, George Gray, Dan Green, Greg Grohoski, Mike Haertel, Andrew Haley, Chris Hinds, Peter Hoffman, Jan Hoogerbrugge, Marty Hopkins, Hugh Hyatt, Gideon Intrater, Dave Jaggar, Earl Killian, Phil Koopman, Al Kossow, Ashok Kumar, Steven Kunkel, Dan Lau, Guy Lemieux, Jud Leonard, Tim Leonard, Richard Lethin, Bill Mangione-Smith, John Mashey, Shawn McLean, Avraham Menachem, Steve Morse, Claude Moughanni, Steve Muchnick, Harm Munk, Michael O'Connor, Vojin Oklobdzija, Tim Olson, Ken Omohundro, Howard Owens, Yale Patt, Dave Patterson, Jeff Rupley, John Ruttenberg, Ulf Samuelsson, Harsh Sharangpani, Ray Simar, Robert Simpson, Peter Song, Zalman Stern, H.W. Stockman, Steve Strazdus, Bob Supnik, Sergey Svishchev, Ran Talmudi, Julian Thomas, Ross Towle, Nick Tredennick, Marc Tremblay, Stuart Tucker, Paul Walker, David Weinzierl, Uri Weiser, Turner Whitted, Sophie Wilson, Steve Wilson, Bill Worley, and Mike Ziegler. (My apologies to these individuals for any misunderstandings on my part about the information they have graciously shared with me; the errors in the architects list above remain mine.)

  ---

  Revision history

  ---

  [History page] [Mark's homepage] [CPSC homepage] [Clemson Univ. homepage]

  mark@cs.clemson.edu