Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present (2003)

cpushack.com

50 pointsmsla19 comments

I recently took apart an Entex Pacman2 which I still have from my childhood.

I found this strange CPU in it (and not much else): Hitachi HD388A20.

It belongs to a family of 4 bit processors (HMSC40) with 10 bit words and 10-12 address lines (512 bytes to 4KB). It's a weird little thing. You can still find the manuals online. They have pins that drive the display directly and some addresses are for storing bit patterns which you can move directly to the display. I guess many portable games from the 80s must have used these chips, but I had never heard of it.

You got any links to info about those chips?

Check out this page: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hitachi/hmcs40

And this manual: https://www.manualslib.com/products/Hitachi-Ap1-10557785.htm...

That Sun MAJC one was interesting, and takes me back to an article[0] by Hannibal from Ars Technica on IA64 (Itanium) and MAJC[1]. MAJC was only used in a couple of Sun Microsystems video cards, and design ideas went into the SPARC T series.

- Variable Length instruction packets - The functional units/execution units were general, i.e. no specific ones for Floating Point. - The compiler was tied to a particular implementation of a MAJC processor, so Java was to be the language for it - ship app in Java bytecode, compile to implementation with a JVM for the particular chip.

[0] https://archive.arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/majc/majc-1.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC

Section Seven would benefit from a few more entries: the MIT Scheme chips, the Texas Instruments Explorer II / microExplorer, and the Symbolics Ivory.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5731

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6334

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1317224.1317226

https://gwern.net/doc/cs/hardware/1987-baker.pdf

It's version 13.4.0 but I figured the year of the last revision would be more useful.

Previously (only ones with comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=641376

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050087

If another version was produced, I wonder what CPUs would be included. I find it mildly irritating that all x86 CPUs (along with Itanium) are talked about under the "Part VII: Intel 8086, IBM's choice (1978)" heading, and doesn't break out the 386 or Pentiums, and likewise with ARM.

Or the SledgeHammer Opteron, which had a number of (x86) innovations like 64 bit and integrated memory controller. With Intel betting on the dead-ends of Netburst and Itanium, it's possible to envision a very different computing landscape if AMD hadn't gone down that route.

In 2023, not counting x86, I'm still using seven of these great processor architectures. NetBSD support is quite good :)

https://zia.io/notice/AWDclbEuAQSxu4UIZk

My youth: Z80, 6502

Micros I used: 8051, PIC, AVR, MSP430

Mainstream CPUs: 68000, x86

DSPs: TMS320Cxx (no SHarc?)

Missing from this list: NIOS II and other soft cores and anything ARM. Maybe they are not supposed to be here.

That's my list exactly. What a trip down 40 years of programming!

* 6502 in my Vic20 and Apple ][, as a teenager (both computers' manuals had complete circuit schematics)

* Z80 assembly during my Elec Eng degree

* 8051 assembly for embedded systems I built for some consulting clients during my PhD

* DSPs including DSP32C (1992) and TMS320Cxx, considered for radar processing during my PhD (though by that stage, the 486 turned out to be good enough!)

* x86 for everything else. Especially once PCs came with the x87 floating point processors (for 386, before the 486 integrated the FPU into the CPU).

Oh, the nostalgia!

I remember the first "holy war" I was ever exposed to was Z80 vs 6502.

I had a Z80 CP/M card in my 6502 computer (Apple ][) but my heart was always on the 6502 side.

My first exposure to the Z80 was via Rodnay Zaks's book [1].

And, just because I was curious, here's the Vic-20's 6502 circuit diagram [2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/Programming_the_Z-80_2nd_Edition...

[2] https://www.vic-20.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/VIC-20-Sche...

P.S. Fun fact - my mobile phone number ends "6502" :)

The Vic 20 was the first commercial microcomputer I owned, and I did a lot of machine language programming on it.

But the first microcomputer I owned was one I built myself, based on the 8085A (which was basically the same as an 8080). Since the Z80 was essentially an enhanced 8080, I could never choose a side on the Z80/6502 wars and consider the debate a bit stupid (like all holy wars).

I forgot about DSP32C, we had that in one of our vision systems. Fun chip but I preferred the TI offerings.

To complete my microprocessor list, here are the two exotic CPUs I most wanted to try as a teenager. Buying them in mid-1980s Australia was not realistic, especially since I had no money. The closest I came to them was reading about them in Byte magazine...

* Inmos T414 Transputer (1985), with Occam programming language.

* Novix NC4016 (also 1985), designed by Chuck Moore, which executed Forth directly.

If the article were (2006), it would have mentioned Parallax Propeller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller

Hmm, section 4 https://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu4.html is empty?

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