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Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

first dual core server chips show up generally available in 2001 with IBM POWER4, then HP PA-RISC ones in 2004, and then Opterons which was followed by "emergency" design of essentially two "sockets" on one die of of NetBurst dual core systems.

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Also, I raised the question at https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/30743/3722 and one of the answers points out the 1984 Rockwell R65C29 Dual CMOS Microprocessor. It was two standard 6502 on the same die using the same bus to access the same memory... and of course IBM mainframes did it decades before.

If we're going that direction, National Semiconductor had a 2 'core' COPS4 processor in 1981[1]. I have some in a tube somewhere (unused).

[1] https://www.cpushack.com/2014/08/25/national-semiconductor-c...

Yes, Retro SE also points out the Intel 8271 from 1977 was a dual core microcontroller.

Depends on your definition. The 8271 wasn't programmable by anyone but Intel (at least, they never made that a market option), and the second core was more of a bit-oriented coprocessor, sorta like saying the 80486 is a 2-core processor because of the FPU.

Ehhhh the MAJC 5200 was generally available in 1999 and I am sure even older designs could be found if we were to dig deep enough. Their market share would also need some digging too.

To quote the announcement: "two VLIW (very long instruction word) microprocessors on a single piece of silicon"

Power and PA-RISC shipped servers, though. MAJC on the other hand

> Sun built a single model of the MAJC, the two-core MAJC 5200, which was the heart of Sun's XVR-1000 and XVR-4000 workstation graphics boards.

MAJC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC

Why have I not heard of those before?

By the time of XVR GPUs Sun was pretty much exiting the workstation market, and unlike Elite3D and Creator3D the competition has widened for "good enough" PC alternatives using Nvidia and similar chips

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